AI Visibility Drift: The Quiet Collapse Between Retrains (www.aivojournal.org)

AI visibility between model retrains is collapsing faster than most corporate audits assume. A longitudinal audit of 50 brands since August found median Prompt-Space Occupancy Score (PSOS) volatility has tripled and the average answer-share half-life is just 19 days, meaning half of a brand’s generative responses degrade or get substituted in under three weeks. Rapid, frequent model updates—ChatGPT 4o/o1’s recency-weighted retrieval with partial updates every 4–8 weeks, Gemini 1.5 Pro’s continuous Knowledge-Graph ingestion, and Claude 3.5’s frequent trust-filter recalibrations—drive a ΔPSOS/Δt exceeding 2.7 points/week. Vertical shocks are worst in travel, finance, and consumer electronics where catalogs or regulations change often. This isn’t malice but entropy: continual rebalancing of relevance, authority, and safety pushes brands out of visible answer-space, creating measurable commercial impact (a 5-point monthly PSOS drop in high-intent categories linked to a 1.2% quarterly EBITDA compression). The practical takeaway: static, point-in-time AI audits are governance blind spots. The AIVO Standard reframes PSOS as a living metric via Audit → Monitor → Alert → Verify, coupling continuous volatility detection with controlled prompt testing to confirm fixes. AIVO Journal is launching Brand Visibility Watch, a weekly brief tracking drift across assistants and sectors. For marketers, compliance teams, and product owners, visibility must be treated like any other governed asset—continuously measured, alerted, and remediated between retrains.