Original research · updated July 2026
The AI Visibility Index
We asked AI to recommend the best businesses in America's biggest categories — then measured whether the biggest brands even show up. The answer reset how we think about search. Here's the data.
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Average AI visibility of the household-name brands we tested for their core category.
The findings
Query tested: "best coffee shop in Seattle"
AI recommended instead: Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Milstead & Co., Victrola Coffee Roasters, Caffe Vita
Query tested: "best pizza place in Chicago"
AI recommended instead: Lou Malnati's Pizzeria, Pequod's Pizza, Giordano's, Bartoli's Pizzeria
Query tested: "best hotel in New York"
AI recommended instead: Aman New York, The Ritz-Carlton NoMad, 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, The Greenwich Hotel
Query tested: "best gym in Los Angeles"
AI recommended instead: Equinox West Hollywood, Gold's Gym Venice, LA Fitness Downtown, Crunch Hollywood
Query tested: "best tax preparation service in Dallas"
AI recommended instead: Lone Star Tax Service, Apex Income Tax, New Horizons Tax Services, VIP Choice Tax
What it means
AI assistants don't default to the biggest brand — they recommend whoever appears most consistently on the sources they trust (directories, reviews, maps, authoritative pages). For local and category queries, that's usually independents, not national chains.
With 45% of US consumers now asking AI for recommendations, this is the single biggest shift in how customers discover businesses since Google — and unlike Google rankings, there's no results page to check. If AI leaves you out, you never enter the conversation, and the lost demand leaves no trace.
The upside: because it's driven by trusted sources, AI visibility is winnable — and now, measurable.
Methodology
Each brand was tested with a real, live query to ChatGPT (web-enabled) for its core category in a major US city. "Visible" means the brand appeared in the AI's recommended list. Scans are repeatable — run the free audit on any business to verify. We re-run and expand this index over time.
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