The 44-Point Gap: Why Luxury Cigar and Whisky Brands Are Losing the AI Search Race

What does this week's data actually show?

This week the AI Visibility Index measured 11 brands, returning an average readiness score of 59 out of 100. That figure sits just above the halfway mark — a passable but unremarkable result that masks a far more revealing story underneath.

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 tells us that the typical brand in this week's sample is doing roughly half of what it could to be visible in AI-generated answers. Half the job is not enough when an assistant returns a single recommendation rather than a page of ten blue links.

How wide is the gap between leaders and laggards?

The headline number this week is not the average — it is the spread. The top-scoring entry, The AI Visibility Index itself, posted a readiness of 87. At the other end, Turmeaus Cigars registered just 32. That is a 44-point gap between the most and least AI-ready brands in the same competitive landscape.

A 44-point spread is the difference between being the answer and being invisible. When an AI assistant is asked to recommend a whisky retailer or a cigar specialist, it draws on the sites it can most easily read, verify and trust. A brand at 87 is structured to be quoted. A brand at 32 is, in practice, background noise.

Among the specialist retailers, The Whisky Shop leads at 76 — the strongest performer of the trading brands this week. EGM Cigars follows at 66, comfortably above the field average. Below them the scores compress and then fall away: Hard To Find Whisky at 57, C.Gars Ltd at 56, City Cigars at 50, The Drink Shop at 48, and Turmeaus Cigars trailing at 32.

Why are so many brands clustered around the middle?

Four of this week's brands sit within a nine-point band, between 48 and 57. That clustering is significant. It suggests a group of retailers that have done the basics — a working site, product pages, some structure — but have not yet made the deliberate changes that separate a cited brand from a merely functional one.

The brands in this middle band are the ones with the most to gain. The gap between 48 and 76 is not a matter of rebuilding a website from scratch; it is a matter of clarity, structure and machine-readable trust signals. These are the brands that could move fastest, because the foundations already exist.

What separates a 76 from a 32?

The difference is rarely visible to a human browsing the site. It lives in how information is structured, how clearly a brand states what it sells and to whom, and how easily an AI system can extract a confident, quotable answer. A brand scoring 76, like The Whisky Shop, has made itself legible to machines. A brand at 32 has left the assistant to guess — and assistants that guess tend to recommend someone else.

This is the core discipline that our methodology is built to measure. Readiness is not a vanity metric; it is a proxy for whether a brand appears when a customer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation. In categories such as premium whisky and cigars, where buyers increasingly ask an assistant before they ask a shop, that appearance is the whole game.

Why does this matter for whisky and cigar retailers specifically?

These are considered-purchase categories. A customer choosing a rare whisky or a box of cigars often researches before buying, and that research increasingly begins with a conversational query rather than a search bar. If an assistant can confidently name The Whisky Shop or EGM Cigars but stumbles over a rival, the rival has lost the sale before the customer ever reaches the checkout.

With the field average at 59, most of these brands are visible to AI assistants only intermittently — cited when the phrasing happens to suit them, ignored when it does not. Consistency of citation is what the leaders are building, and it is what the middle band is missing.

What should brands take from this week's readings?

The lesson of the 44-point gap is that AI visibility is earned, not assumed. A score of 32 is not a verdict on a brand's quality, its products or its reputation — it is a verdict on how ready its website is to be read by machines. That is fixable, and often quickly.

Brands that want to close the gap should start by understanding where they stand against their category, tracked in the Index, and by reading the wider trends in the State of AI Visibility report. The retailers moving up the table are the ones treating AI readiness as a discipline rather than an afterthought.

The numbers this week are clear: the top of the table is pulling away, and the middle is running out of time to catch up.

Run a scan to see how ready your brand is to be found and cited by AI assistants.