AI Visibility

Buyers increasingly ask an assistant "who should I hire?" instead of scanning ten blue links, and the assistant answers with two to five named businesses and its reasons. Being one of those names is AI visibility; being absent is invisible in a channel that produces no second page.

It is measurable. Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, with web search enabled the way consumer apps run it, and record who gets named, how often, and which sources are cited as evidence. That is what our research does across six trades and five metros, and what the free AI visibility report does for a single business.

AI visibility is earned with the same raw material as search visibility — consistent business data, dense recent reviews, pages that state facts plainly — but it is won or lost per answer, and no rank tracker sees it.

What the measurement changes is the shape of the question. A ranking report tells you where you sit on a ladder. An answer sample tells you whether a ladder exists yet. Across the 30 markets we measured, the difference between trades was far larger than the difference between cities: dental markets scored 80–90 on our openness score in every metro, meaning no practice had established itself anywhere, while plumbing and roofing markets clustered in the low 60s with a recognisable favourite. Same five cities, opposite strategic situations.

Two cautions keep the number honest. Assistants are non-deterministic, so a single answer proves nothing and any credible figure comes with a sample size and a date attached. And visibility is not the same as preference — being named alongside four competitors in a list is real but weak, while being the business an assistant explains and recommends is the thing worth chasing. Both are visible in the raw answers, which is why we publish them rather than only the summary.