Why Luxury Drinks and Cigars Are Losing the Race to Be Cited by AI

What do this week's readings actually show?

This week the the Index tracked 11 brands and recorded an average readiness score of 59 out of 100. That number sits almost exactly on the fence: it says the typical site is neither invisible to AI assistants nor reliably citable by them. In practice, a score around the midpoint means a brand is leaving its presence in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to chance.

The spread is the real story. At the top, The AI Visibility Index itself scored 87, followed by The Whisky Shop at 76 and EGM Cigars at 66. At the foot of the table, Turmeaus Cigars recorded 32 — less than half the leader's score and 27 points below the average. Between the strongest and weakest brands lies a 55-point chasm. That gap is the difference between being the answer an assistant gives and not being mentioned at all.

Who is leading, and why does it matter?

Among the retail brands, The Whisky Shop (76) sets the pace. It is the only commercial site this week to break into the high-70s, and it shows what disciplined structure looks like: content an assistant can parse, claims it can quote, and a site architecture it can crawl without friction. EGM Cigars (66) is the next clearest performer, the only other brand above the 60 mark.

The lesson is simple. Readiness is not a popularity contest decided by brand size; it is decided by how legible your site is to a machine reading it. A well-known name with a poorly structured site will be out-cited by a smaller competitor that has done the groundwork. In an AI-mediated market, visibility is engineered, not inherited.

Where is the middle of the market stuck?

The densest cluster this week sits between the high-40s and high-50s: Hard To Find Whisky (57), C.Gars Ltd (56), City Cigars (50) and The Drink Shop (48). These four brands are within nine points of one another, which tells you something important — most of the field is bunched in a narrow band just around the average.

That clustering is both a warning and an opportunity. It is a warning because brands in this band are interchangeable in the eyes of an assistant: none has established a clear advantage in being found and quoted. It is an opportunity because the margins are thin. A handful of structural fixes — clearer product information, machine-readable answers to common questions, cleaner page structure — could move a brand from the middle of the pack to the front of it. The distance between City Cigars at 50 and EGM Cigars at 66 is not a canyon; it is a to-do list.

How worried should the brands at the bottom be?

Turmeaus Cigars, at 32, is the clear outlier. It sits 27 points below the weekly average and 44 points behind The Whisky Shop. A score this low signals that an AI assistant asked about the category may not surface the brand at all, or may rely on second-hand descriptions it cannot verify from the site itself.

The danger of a low readiness score is that it compounds silently. Unlike a search ranking you can watch slip, an absence from AI-generated answers produces no error message and no bounce-rate alarm. The traffic simply never arrives, because the recommendation was never made. Brands at the foot of the table are not being penalised; they are being overlooked — which is harder to detect and, left unaddressed, harder to reverse.

What does the whisky-and-cigar field tell us about Generative Engine Optimisation?

This week's cohort is dominated by spirits and premium tobacco retailers — considered-purchase categories where buyers ask detailed questions before they commit. These are precisely the queries an AI assistant now fields: which bottling to choose, how one cigar compares to another, where to buy a hard-to-find release. If a brand's site cannot supply citable, structured answers, the assistant turns to whoever can.

That is why the 55-point spread between top and bottom matters more in these categories than in impulse-buy ones. The brands that win the recommendation win a high-intent customer. As we argue in the State of AI Visibility report, readiness is becoming the decisive distribution channel for considered purchases, and the gaps we see this week are gaps in revenue, not just in scores.

What should brands do with these numbers?

The practical takeaway is to treat readiness as a measurable, improvable metric rather than a mystery. The leaders this week did not reach the 70s and 80s by accident — they built sites that machines can read, trust and quote. Our scoring reflects exactly the signals assistants use, and you can see how we assess each site in our methodology.

An average of 59 across the field means almost every brand here has room to climb. The difference between the middle of the pack and the top is a set of deliberate, structural choices — and the first of those choices is to find out where you stand.

Run a scan to see your own readiness score and where you sit against this week's field.