Why a 59 Average Means Most Drinks and Cigar Brands Are Half-Visible to AI

What do this week's numbers actually show?

This week the AI Visibility Index read 11 brands and returned an average readiness score of 59 out of 100. That single figure is the story: most of the drinks and cigar retailers we measured sit just above the halfway mark on whether their sites are built to be found, understood and cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

A 59 average is not a failing grade, but it is a warning. It means the typical brand in this cohort is roughly as likely to be misread by an AI assistant as it is to be quoted accurately. In a world where buyers increasingly ask an assistant rather than a search engine, being half-visible is closer to invisible than most merchants assume.

Who leads, and by how much?

The top of the table is led by The AI Visibility Index itself at 87 — the benchmark against which the field is measured. Among the retail brands, The Whisky Shop is the clear front-runner at 76, a full 17 points above the cohort average. EGM Cigars follows at 66, the only other brand comfortably clear of the midpoint.

After that, the scores bunch tightly and then fall away. Hard To Find Whisky sits at 57, C.Gars Ltd at 56, and City Cigars at 50 — a cluster hovering right around the median. The Drink Shop registers 48, just below the line.

The gap between The Whisky Shop at 76 and the bottom-ranked brand at 32 is 44 points. That is the difference between a site an AI assistant can confidently summarise and recommend, and one it struggles to parse at all.

Where is the sector losing ground?

The bottom of this week's table tells a sharper story than the average. Turmeaus Cigars reads 32 — the lowest score in the cohort and 27 points below the field average of 59. When a brand scores in the low thirties, it typically signals that the fundamentals an assistant relies on are thin or absent: clear product descriptions, structured data, consistent naming, and content that answers the questions buyers actually ask.

The Drink Shop at 48, City Cigars at 50, C.Gars Ltd at 56 and Hard To Find Whisky at 57 make up the rest of the lower half. What is striking is how narrow the band is — four of the five lowest-ranked brands sit within nine points of one another. This is not a story of a few laggards dragging down a strong field. It is a story of a sector clustered in the mediocre middle, where small, deliberate improvements could reorder the entire table.

Why does readiness matter more than traffic?

Readiness measures something traditional analytics miss entirely. A brand can rank well in classic search, attract healthy traffic and still be poorly equipped for the way AI assistants read the web. When someone asks an assistant to recommend a whisky retailer or a cigar specialist, the assistant does not browse — it synthesises. It rewards sites whose information is explicit, structured and unambiguous, and it quietly passes over those that are not.

That is why The Whisky Shop's 76 is worth more than any single traffic figure. A high readiness score means the brand is more likely to be the one an assistant names, links and recommends. A score of 32, by contrast, means a brand is likely being left out of answers it should be winning — regardless of how strong its catalogue or reputation may be.

What separates a 76 from a 32?

The honest answer is: not as much as the gap suggests. Readiness is built from repeatable fundamentals, and most of them are within any merchant's control. Clear, machine-readable product and category pages. Consistent brand naming across the site. Content that answers real buyer questions in plain language. Structure that lets an assistant extract facts without guessing.

The brands clustered at 48 to 57 this week are not far from breaking into the leading group. A handful of targeted fixes could move a 50 to a 65 — and in a field this tightly packed, that is the difference between mid-table and podium. You can see the full field on the Index, and the framework behind every score is set out in our methodology.

What should brands take from this week?

The reading is clear: this is a sector that has not yet taken AI visibility seriously as a discipline. An average of 59 across 11 brands, with a long tail down to 32, is the signature of a market where the winners have not yet run away with it — but soon could. The brands that treat readiness as a measurable, improvable asset now will be the ones AI assistants recommend by default later.

For the wider picture of how visibility is shifting across categories, see the State of AI Visibility report.

Want to know where your brand sits on the same 0–100 scale? Run a scan.