Rankmio Visibility Index

The four pillars and their shares

• SERP visibility, 40 points — how well the domain ranks, weighted by the demand behind each term.
• AI citations, 25 points — citation rate times 80 plus mention rate times 20, capped by the share of engines actually checked. Checking only two of five yields at most 40 per cent of the value.
• Traffic, 20 points — Google and Bing clicks combined, on a logarithmic scale. 10,000 clicks a month give the full score.
• Backlinks, 15 points — the health score from the Backlinks Hub, taken as is.

The total is the sum of the four contributions, not their average. If a source is missing, its share stays unfilled and is not redistributed. The weights are fixed and identical across all projects.

How the SERP pillar is calculated

Everything rests on one quantity, visibility: the sum across all search terms of demand times the click probability of the position. A term in position 1 with 1,000 searches contributes 280, the same term in position 40 only 4.

That splits into two parts. The level (60 points) measures size, on a logarithmic scale up to an anchor of 3,000 expected clicks. The capture rate (40 points) measures quality: how much the domain extracts from its own demand compared with holding position 1 everywhere. The capture rate is independent of size, so a small provider with good positions scores as well as a large one.

Below 300 impressions a month the capture rate is not calculated, because with four impressions it would inevitably read as one hundred per cent. Those projects reach at most 60 of the 100 SERP points, and that cap is stated too.

Where the SERP data comes from

Three sources, combined in this order.

• Google Search Console provides the basis. Demand there is actual impressions. It wins every overlap because it measures rather than estimates.
• The position tracker only adds terms Search Console does not know at all, typically those below its impression threshold. Demand there is estimated search volume.
• Bing is added, not reconciled.

The difference between adding and reconciling matters. Search Console and the position tracker describe the same search engine: if both report the same term, that is one ranking, not two. Bing is a different search engine, and whoever searches there is not the same person searching on Google. Netting those clicks against each other would cancel out real visibility.

Bing stays out of the capture rate. That part relates what was achieved to what was achievable and needs a complete population, but the Bing export only supplies the strongest queries.

What Sistrix does differently, and why it became the standard

The Sistrix Visibility Index uses the same principle for search visibility: position times search volume times expected click-through rate, summed up. The difference lies in the population. Sistrix measures weekly against a fixed keyword set of roughly one million terms per country, in place since 2008 and largely unchanged.

That fixed set is exactly what made the value a standard. When every domain is measured against the same list, their values are comparable with one another, and because the list barely changes, the trend stays readable across years. A kink appearing on the same day for many domains is a Google update, not a measurement error. Only an external observer with a fixed list can deliver that.

The price is coverage. A fixed list is necessarily head-heavy and does not know the long tail of any single site. For a small or highly specialised domain, Sistrix therefore often shows almost nothing even though the site works fine.

Which value says more?

The two answer different questions, and neither replaces the other.

For comparing domains and spotting Google updates, Sistrix is clearly better. Rankmio cannot do that structurally: its index rests on the Search Console data of the individual project, so on a keyword set that differs for every domain. Holding two Rankmio values against each other makes no sense.

For the state of your own site, Rankmio is more precise. It calculates with the impressions this domain actually received rather than with the estimated volume of an external list, and it sees the long tail no external keyword set knows. On top of that comes AI visibility, which cannot appear in a pure SERP metric at all.

So the practical advice is: read Sistrix to place your own movement against the market. Read the Rankmio value to decide what to work on next, which is what the four pillars are built for. When the total drops, they show immediately which source is giving way.