The 11-Stage AI Visibility Lifecycle: A Framework for Understanding AI-Mediated Content Discovery

This paper defines the AI Visibility Lifecycle, a structured framework describing how modern AI systems discover, interpret, trust, and repeatedly surface websites. It replaces ranking-centric SEO assumptions with lifecycle-based visibility states grounded in admissible infrastructure evidence. Version 0.7 represents a pre-certification, pre-standardization release intended to establish terminology, lifecycle boundaries, and ambiguity constraints prior to broader industry adoption.