Search visibility is the measurement of where, how often, and how well a URL appears in the search results for a given query. Because a page of content could appear in many queries on many search engines, search visibility is difficult to measure. All measurements are arbitrary and limited by the resources used to make them.
The best search visibility measurements are provided by the search engines themselves through their Webmaster dashboards. Baidu, Bing, Google, and Yandex all provide site owners and agents with the ability to verify their sites and monitor search performance. Search visibility as measured by the engines includes queries where URLs are shown, the number of impressions in which the URLs appear, and the regions and/or device types on which those URLs are found in search results.
Because search engine queries are volatile, “rankings” may vary throughout the day, by region or device, and from day to day. A firm consistency should not be expected.
Using third-party SEO tools to measure search visibility is less reliable than using primary search engine data. While this is the only option for competitive analysis, you should refrain from using SEO tools that don’t retrieve data directly from the search engines. 3rd-party tools that estimate rankings are highly inaccurate and unreliable sources of information.