AThe AI Visibility Index

Report · Updated September 2026 · By Eli

The State of AI Visibility

How visible are brands to AI assistants? Aggregate findings from the AI Visibility Index — average AVI Scores, how often AI assistants name and recommend brands, and where the gaps are.

Key findings

  • On the AI Visibility Index, 11 measured brands score an average of 39/100 (median 35).
  • Across 6 brands with live Outcome measurement, AI assistants name the brand in 22% of relevant buying prompts and explicitly recommend it in 4%.
  • AI answers cite the brand's own website just 13% of the time.
  • 63% of brand mentions come from live retrieval — the fixable half — versus 37% from the model's trained memory.
  • The most visible brand measured is The Whisky Shop, at 76/100.

Based on 11 brands measured on the AI Visibility Index as of September 2026, the average AVI Score is 39/100 (median 35). Most brands are still early: being found by AI is a discipline few have deliberately built for.

Across the 6 brands with live Outcome measurement, AI assistants named the brand in 22% of relevant buying prompts on average, and explicitly recommended it 4% of the time — with sources cited just 13% of the time.

11

Brands measured

39

Average AVI

35

Median AVI

6

With Outcome

How brands are distributed

Distribution of the 11 measured brands across AVI maturity bands.
BandBrandsShare
Established19%
Developing218%
Emerging655%

Which AI names brands most

Average mention rate by provider — how often each assistant names a measured brand in a relevant prompt.

Average brand mention rate by AI provider, across measured brands.
ProviderMention rate
gemini32%
perplexity21%
openai20%
anthropic14%

How brands surface today

37%from the model's trained memory (parametric) · 63% from live retrieval.

Retrieval is the fixable half — better content, structure and citations move it now. Parametric memory shifts only slowly, as the web that trains the next model changes.

Most visible brands

The most visible measured brands, ranked by AVI Score out of 100.
RankBrandAVI Score
01The Whisky Shop76/100
02Hard To Find Whisky57/100
03The Drink Shop48/100
04C.Gars Ltd38/100
05The AI Visibility Index35/100

Method. The AVI Score combines Outcome (60%) — how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity name and recommend a brand across sampled buying prompts — with Readiness (40%), how well a site is built to be found and cited. This is an early cut across 11 brands; figures will firm up as coverage grows. Full methodology.

Where does your brand rank?

Get your AVI Score and see how AI assistants read you.