The 44-Point Gap: What This Week's Cigar and Spirits Readings Reveal

What do this week's readings actually show?

This week the AI Visibility Index measured 11 brands, returning an average readiness score of 59 out of 100. That midpoint tells its own story: the average brand is roughly half-built for a world where ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity increasingly decide which retailers get named in an answer.

Readiness is a 0–100 measure of how well a brand's website is structured to be found and cited by AI assistants. A score of 59 is not a failing grade, but it is a warning. It means the typical brand in this week's cohort leaves a substantial share of its potential AI visibility on the table — visible to shoppers who search the old way, invisible to those who ask an assistant.

Who leads, and by how much?

Setting aside the Index itself at 87, The Whisky Shop tops the field of measured retailers with a readiness of 76. That is a commanding lead in this cohort, and it demonstrates that specialist drinks and cigar merchants can be built to be machine-readable when the fundamentals are in place.

Behind it, the pack tightens quickly. EGM Cigars scores 66, Hard To Find Whisky 57, C.Gars Ltd 56, and City Cigars lands precisely on 50 — the exact halfway point of the scale. The Drink Shop follows at 48.

The headline number, though, is the spread. From The Whisky Shop at 76 down to Turmeaus Cigars at 32, this week's readings span a 44-point gap. In a category as tightly defined as premium spirits and cigars, that gulf is not about product quality or reputation. It is about how each site is constructed for the machines now mediating discovery.

Why does a 44-point spread matter?

When a shopper asks an AI assistant to recommend a whisky specialist or a place to buy cigars, the assistant does not browse the way a person does. It draws on sources it can parse, trust and cite. A brand scoring 76 is far more likely to be surfaced in that answer than one scoring 32 — even if both sell comparable goods to comparable customers.

That is the quiet risk in this week's data. Turmeaus Cigars at 32 is not absent from the web; it is under-built for AI retrieval. City Cigars at 50 and The Drink Shop at 48 sit in a middle band where small structural improvements — clearer product information, cleaner markup, more citable content — could move them decisively up the field. The distance between the middle of the pack and the leader is closeable, and it is closeable with work that is entirely within each brand's control.

Is the cigar and spirits category behind?

The cohort average of 59 suggests a category still finding its footing in AI search. Five brands this week sit at or below the halfway line: Hard To Find Whisky at 57, C.Gars Ltd at 56, City Cigars at 50, The Drink Shop at 48, and Turmeaus Cigars at 32. That is a majority of the measured field clustered at or beneath the midpoint.

The pattern is consistent with what we track across categories in the State of AI Visibility report: incumbents who dominated traditional search have not automatically carried that advantage into AI-mediated discovery. Being well-known is not the same as being well-structured. An assistant cannot cite a reputation; it cites a page it can read.

That is also why The Whisky Shop's 76 is instructive. It shows the ceiling in this category is high and achievable. The brands scoring in the 40s and 50s are not competing against an impossible standard — they are competing against a peer who has simply done more of the groundwork.

What separates a 76 from a 32?

The difference rarely comes down to a single dramatic fix. Readiness reflects the cumulative effect of many decisions: whether product and category pages carry clear, structured information; whether content answers the questions customers actually ask; whether a site is technically legible to the crawlers that feed AI systems. Our full scoring approach is set out in our methodology.

The encouraging reading of this week's data is that the gap is mechanical, not mysterious. A 44-point spread within one tightly defined category means the leaders are doing specific, repeatable things that the trailing brands are not yet doing. None of it requires a bigger marketing budget or a better product — it requires building for how AI assistants read the web.

The bottom line

With 11 brands averaging 59, and a field stretching from 76 down to 32, this week's readings capture a category mid-transition. The brands that treat AI visibility as a structural discipline — not an afterthought — are already pulling ahead. The rest have a clear, measurable target to aim at.

The first step is knowing where you stand. Run a scan to see how your brand reads to the assistants your customers are already asking.