When buyers ask AI for a recommendation, does your name come up?
AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity name your business when someone asks them a real buying question. You measure it by asking those questions live and reading the answers word for word. Search rankings do not tell you.
What we found when we asked
41 of 45 UK Firms Are Invisible When Buyers Ask AI for a Recommendation
We ran a bigger version of our September test: 45 real UK coaching and accountancy firms, three AI engines, every answer kept word for word. Four were ever recommended. Nineteen were misdescribed when asked about by name.
We Asked AI Who's Best in Accountancy, Law, Fintech, and Coaching. Here's Who Showed Up.
We ran 15 real UK accountancy, legal, fintech, and coaching firms through the same test our AI Visibility Score runs for clients: real, unprompted buyer questions, asked live to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. In every single vertical, one firm dominated the answers. Most of the others never came up at all.
We Checked Whether Ahrefs, Semrush, Profound, and Otterly Actually Optimise for AI Citation. Most Don't.
The companies selling AI visibility monitoring should be the best-optimised sites on the internet for AI citation. We checked four of the biggest names against the same signals they would flag in a client audit, llms.txt, structured data, and citable content. Most were not.
What AI Visibility Monitoring Actually Costs in 2026
We compared the publicly listed pricing of every AI visibility monitoring platform we could verify, from $29/month tools up to $495/month enterprise platforms, against a free report and £6.99/month monitoring.
What Is llms.txt, and Does Your Site Need One?
robots.txt tells search engines what they can crawl. llms.txt does something different: it tells AI systems what actually matters. Here is what the standard is, what a real one looks like, and whether your site needs one yet.
Check your own business
The AI Visibility Score asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity real buyer questions about your sector, live, and shows their answers word for word: who they recommend, how often they name you, and anything they get wrong about you. The full report is free. Ongoing monitoring is optional, at £6.99 a month.
Four things that move AI visibility
- 1
Be named on other sites
In our 45-firm test, the few firms AI recommended were the ones that had been written about elsewhere, and the same names came back across all three engines. AI engines recommend firms other websites talk about.
- 2
Say the same thing everywhere
Name, services, location and founders should read identically on your site, your structured data and every profile. AI systems trust facts they can confirm in more than one place.
- 3
Write answers that can be quoted
Open each section with a direct answer, and put numbers next to their date and source. AI systems lift passages, so a sentence that stands on its own is more likely to be repeated.
- 4
Let the crawlers in
Allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt, serve your text in the HTML, and consider an llms.txt file. These are the basics; on their own they do not get you recommended.
The terms, in plain English
- AI Visibility Score →
- An AI Visibility Score is a free diagnostic that checks, verbatim and live, what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity actually say about a specific business when asked a real, unprompted buyer question.
- AI Mention Rate →
- AI Mention Rate is the percentage of relevant buyer questions where an AI system like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity names a specific business in its answer, measured by asking real questions live and checking the actual response, not estimated from search rankings.
- AI Share of Voice →
- AI Share of Voice measures which named competitors an AI system cites instead of, or alongside, a given business when answering a relevant buyer question, showing exactly who is winning the mention a business did not get.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) →
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a business easy for AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to find, verify, and cite when answering a buyer's question, as distinct from optimizing for a ranked list of search results.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) →
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content, especially direct questions and self-contained answers, so that AI systems and conversational search interfaces can quote or cite it directly in response to a spoken or typed question.
- llms.txt →
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that gives AI systems a curated map of a site's most important pages, distinct from robots.txt, which only controls what a crawler is allowed to fetch, not what actually matters once it gets there.