Every Duly Noted report sorts each AI answer into one of three outcomes for your business: absent, named, or linked. People sometimes ask why we bother with the middle one. If the assistant said your name, isn't that the win?

It's a win. It's just not the whole win, and the gap between the two is where the revenue lives.

What "named" looks like

A customer in Tucson asks ChatGPT for a good emergency plumber. The answer comes back as a short list: three businesses, a sentence each, maybe a note to check reviews and licensing. Your business is second on the list.

That's a named result. The customer now has your name. To act on it they open a new tab, type your name into Google, and click whatever comes up — which might be your site, might be your Yelp page, might be a lead-gen directory that has scraped your details and will sell the call to a competitor.

You were recommended, and the recommendation leaked.

What "linked" looks like

Same question, but the assistant includes your website — either as an inline link in the text or, in Perplexity's and Gemini's case, as a numbered source the customer can tap. Now the path from recommendation to your phone number is one click, and it runs through a page you control.

That's a linked result. It converts at a different rate because there is no leak. It also tells you something about how the assistant knows you: it has read your site recently enough to cite it, which means the crawler is getting in and the page is saying something worth citing.

How the score weighs it

For every assistant and every question, the report assigns one of three values. A linked answer scores 1. A named-but-not-linked answer scores 0.6. An absent answer scores 0. The AI visibility figure is the average of those values across every assistant-and-question pair — four assistants times three questions, twelve cells.

So a business that is named in six of twelve answers and linked in none scores 30. A business named in three and linked in three scores 40. A business linked in all twelve scores 100, which I have not yet seen and don't expect to.

Why 0.6 and not 0.5? Because a name is worth more than half a link. Customers do search for a name they've just been given, and a strong Google Business Profile catches most of them. The number is a judgement, and I'd rather state the judgement than pretend the arithmetic is neutral. It's on the How it works page for the same reason.

Why the distinction points at the fix

The practical value is diagnostic. The two outcomes fail for different reasons.

If you're named but never linked, the assistants know your business exists — probably from directories, reviews and third-party mentions — but they aren't reading or trusting your own site enough to cite it. That's almost always a site problem: crawlers blocked, no schema telling them what the site is, content too thin to quote. The fixes are technical and fast.

If you're absent everywhere, the assistants don't know you exist, or don't associate you with the category and place being asked about. That's an entity problem. The site fixes still matter, but the bigger lever is off-site: consistent name, address and phone across the directories the assistants actually read, a fully built Google Business Profile, third-party pages that mention you alongside the words "plumber" and "Tucson."

If you're linked by one assistant and absent from the others — common — look at which one. Perplexity links because it searched and found you; ChatGPT didn't because its search source is Bing and your site isn't well indexed there. That's a specific fix: Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, done.

The competitor list is the other half

Under the score, every report lists the domains the assistants cited instead of you, counted. Read it with the named-versus-linked distinction in mind. When a competitor is linked six times and you're named once, the difference is not that they're a better plumber. It's that their site is legible to a machine and yours isn't yet. That's an encouraging finding, because legibility is buildable.

When the list is mostly Yelp, Angi and HomeAdvisor, the assistants are leaning on aggregators because they can't find enough first-party pages worth citing. Getting your own site linked means giving them one.

What to do with this

Open your report. Count the linked cells. If the number is zero and the named count isn't, you have a site problem and a short fix list. If both are zero, start with your Google Business Profile and the four directories that show up in your competitor list, then come back to the site.

Then re-run it in a month. Named-to-linked is the transition the trend chart is built to show, and it's the one that shows up in the phone log.