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

What do this week's numbers actually show?

This week the Index tracked 11 brands, with an average AI readiness of 59 out of 100. That figure is the headline, but it hides more than it reveals. Between the strongest and weakest performers in the specialist whisky and cigar trade lies a 44-point gap — from Turmeaus Cigars at 32 to The Whisky Shop at 76.

Readiness measures how well a brand's website is built to be found, understood and cited by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. A score of 59 is a passing grade, not a strong one. It means the average brand in this cohort is roughly halfway to being reliably surfaced when a shopper asks an AI assistant for a recommendation.

Who is leading, and by how much?

Setting aside The AI Visibility Index itself at 85 — the reference point rather than a competitor — The Whisky Shop leads the field at 76. That places it a clear 10 points ahead of the next brand, EGM Cigars at 66, and nearly 20 points above the cohort average.

The order below the leaders tells its own story:

• The Whisky Shop — 76
• EGM Cigars — 66
• Hard To Find Whisky — 57
• C.Gars Ltd — 56
• City Cigars — 50
• The Drink Shop — 48
• Turmeaus Cigars — 32

Only two brands clear 60. Five sit at or below the 57 mark. That distribution is the real signal this week: a small group pulling away, and a long tail of brands that AI assistants will struggle to cite with confidence.

Why does a 44-point spread matter?

When a shopper asks an assistant "where can I buy a hard-to-find single malt?" the model does not average the market — it picks. It surfaces the sources it can parse, trust and quote. A brand at 76 is far more likely to be that source than a brand at 32.

The gap between Turmeaus Cigars at 32 and The Whisky Shop at 76 is therefore not a gap in quality of product; it is a gap in machine-readability. Two shops can sell comparable goods and yet appear worlds apart to an AI assistant. In a category where several brands — EGM Cigars, C.Gars Ltd, City Cigars and Turmeaus Cigars — compete for the same cigar buyer, that difference decides who gets named.

What separates a 57 from a 76?

The cluster in the middle is instructive. Hard To Find Whisky (57), C.Gars Ltd (56) and City Cigars (50) sit within seven points of one another. Brands bunched this tightly are not failing — they are one round of structured improvements away from breaking into the leading group.

Readiness rewards the unglamorous fundamentals: clean, structured product data; clear answers to the questions buyers actually ask; content an assistant can lift and attribute without ambiguity. Our methodology treats these as the difference between a page a model can quote and a page it quietly skips. The brands scoring in the 50s typically have the raw material but lack the structure; the brands in the 70s have made themselves easy to cite.

Is the cigar trade lagging the whisky trade?

The data hints at it, but the picture is mixed. The single highest scoring specialist is a whisky retailer, The Whisky Shop at 76. Yet the lowest, Turmeaus Cigars at 32, is a cigar merchant — and so is the second-highest, EGM Cigars at 66. The category is not the destiny; execution is. Within the cigar cohort alone the range runs from 32 to 66, a 34-point spread that no single sector-wide explanation can account for.

That internal variation is the most useful finding of the week. It means every brand in the lower half is being outperformed by a direct peer, not by an unreachable outsider. The benchmark is right next door.

What should a brand take from this week?

Three readings stand out. First, an average of 59 across 11 brands confirms that AI readiness is still an emerging discipline in this trade — most sites were built for human browsers and search engines, not for assistants that summarise and cite. Second, the leaders show the ceiling is reachable: 76 is a strong, defensible score achieved by a specialist retailer, not a technology company. Third, the tightly packed middle means position is fluid; a brand at 48 or 50 could move several places with focused work.

For the wider view of how these patterns hold across categories, see the State of AI Visibility report. The trend it documents is simple: the brands that make themselves legible to AI assistants now will own the recommendations later.

The question for every brand in this week's table is not whether AI assistants will shape buying decisions in whisky and cigars — it is whether your site is built to be the answer when they do.

Run a scan to see where your brand sits against this week's benchmark.