How Beseam counts visibility
The three rules that decide what a Beseam visibility percentage means, and what it never means.
A visibility percentage is only useful if you know what was asked, of whom, and over what window. Most tools round that uncertainty away and hand you a single score. These are the rules Beseam counts by, and the ones to hold us to.
Unmeasured is never zero
An engine we did not check in the window shows as not measured. It never collapses into a 0%.
A 0% always means the same thing: we asked, the check completed, and your product was absent from the answer. Those are different problems with different fixes, and a tool that merges them is telling you to work on the wrong one.
Every percentage states its denominator
Share of answers means share of that engine's completed checks in that window. The window is printed next to the number.
A share across engines is a different number with a different denominator, and it is labelled as such. Checks that failed to complete are excluded from the denominator rather than counted as misses — an engine timing out is our problem, not your catalog's.
Losing and being unreadable are different problems
When an engine names no brands at all for a question, we say so rather than reporting you as absent.
Being beaten by a competitor is a marketing problem. Being unreadable — the answer could not resolve any product because the underlying data does not support it — is a product-data problem. The second is cheaper to fix, it is usually ours to fix, and it comes first in the queue.
What this rules out
We cannot tell you your placement inside an answer that no vendor exposes, and we do not model one. Where the evidence stops, the number stops.
See also: the Fieldbook evidence model, which covers how observed, attributed, modeled, and verified facts are kept apart everywhere else in the product.