The State of AI Search Visibility 2026
Every number below comes from 2,593 real brand checks run through GeoBuddy's own free AI visibility checker — not a survey, not an estimate.
Run your own free checkThe headline numbers
59.5%
of checked brands are invisible — never mentioned by any of the four engines
14.6%
average AI visibility score across every brand checked
50.2%
of visible brands are the AI's primary recommendation — the rest are just an alternative
Not every engine answers the same way
Mention rate per engine, over the most recent 1,506 prompts checked.
| Engine | Mention rate |
|---|---|
| Perplexity | 7.6% |
| Gemini | 6% |
| ChatGPT | 5.9% |
| Claude | 5.8% |
A brand's AI visibility score depends on which engines its buyers actually use — a single-engine check is not the whole picture.
Which industries are most invisible to AI?
| Industry | Sample | Never mentioned |
|---|---|---|
| Sports & fitness | 12 | 83.3% |
| Design & creative tools | 39 | 76.9% |
| Developer tools, APIs & open source | 95 | 76.8% |
| Web design & development agencies | 30 | 76.7% |
| Skincare & beauty | 167 | 74.9% |
Methodology & limitations
Every number on this page is computed live from GeoBuddy's public /check corpus (2,593 brand checks as of 2026-09-16) — real brands and real people running the free checker, scored the same way each time: the share of buyer-intent prompts in which the brand was named, across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. The per-engine mention rates above sample the most recent checks rather than the full history, since the underlying data is stored per-check and re-scanning the entire corpus on every page view would not scale.
This is not a random sample of all brands: it is self-selected — people who ran a free AI visibility check, skewed toward SaaS, digital products and agencies. It is also not a one-time survey; the numbers move as more checks are run, and this page recomputes them automatically.
Where does your brand stand?
Run the same check on your own brand — free, no signup, results in under a minute.
Looking for third-party research too? See the AI search statistics roundup.