AI Visibility Retrieval Dynamics: Tiered Citation Platforms, Decay, and the Governance Gap in LLM Discoverability

This white paper presents findings from The AIVO Standard’s R&D program based on over 100,000 reverse-engineered prompts across industries and LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok). We define a tiered citation framework—Tier 1 (foundational), Tier 2 (industry validation), Tier 3 (topical/recency)—and show that brands relying primarily on Tier 2/3 experience 40–60% month-on-month visibility volatility in AI assistants. We identify a governance gap in current AI visibility tools (which report where brands appear now but do not measure durability, decay, risk, or causality). We introduce PSOS (Prompt-Space Occupancy Score™), the first governance-grade KPI that weights visibility across tiers, adjusts for decay, and enables board-level reporting, certification, and benchmarking. The AIVO Standard positions PSOS as the audit layer above tools, providing durable, comparable, and auditable AI discoverability metrics.