Why doesn't your brand show up in AI answers?
When your buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who to hire, a name comes back. Increasingly it isn't yours — and often it's nobody's. Here's why that happens, and how we put a number on it.
AI visibility
“When a buyer asks an assistant who to hire, a name comes back. Twelve times out of nineteen, it was nobody's.”
The answer in 30 seconds
- →AI assistants answer buying questions by naming two or three brands. If yours isn't in that shortlist, you're invisible at the moment of choice.
- →It isn't personal. In a set of 19 real buying questions we ran, 12 answers named no vendor at all — the seat is often empty (Tisser measurement, July 2026).
- →You can measure it. We call it share of answer: how often AI names you across a fixed set of buyer questions.
- →Our own baseline, before we published anything: 0 mentions out of 46, across four engines. Zero is a starting line, not a verdict.
What does “invisible in AI answers” actually mean?
Most of your buyers now start with an assistant, not a search page — 94% used AI in a recent purchase (Forrester, 2026). They type a question, read one paragraph, and act on the two or three names inside it. Ranking tenth on Google no longer helps; nobody scrolls to a page an assistant already summarised. If the paragraph doesn't say your name, you weren't in the room.
Why is the seat so often empty?
We ran nineteen real buying questions through a live assistant. Twelve came back naming no vendor at all — generic advice and a shrug (Tisser measurement, July 2026). Assistants stay vague when no source answers the question cleanly, with a name, a number and a date attached. That gap is the opportunity: an empty seat is easier to take than an occupied one.
Isn't this just SEO with a new name?
No. Search sends a click to your page; an assistant reads the page and answers in your place. You win by being the source it quotes, not the link it buries. Different game, different scoreboard — which is why we count share of answer, not rankings.
How do you measure something this fuzzy?
You fix a set of questions your buyers actually ask, run them across the assistants they actually use, and count the answers that name you. Out of the total, that's your share of answer. It's dull, repeatable and honest — and it turns “are we in AI answers?” from a worry into a weekly number. Our starting number was zero. We'd rather know.
Questions your team will ask
Which AI assistants should I worry about?
The ones your buyers use: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. We measure all four — a brand can be visible in one and absent in the rest.
Our brand is well known. Aren't we fine?
Awareness and share of answer are different things. An assistant can know you exist and still not name you for a specific buying question. The only way to know is to run the questions.
Is zero mentions bad?
It's normal before you've published anything an assistant can quote. Ours was 0 of 46. The number only means something as a before-and-after.
How fast can it change?
Slower than a paid ad, faster than classic SEO. Assistants favour fresh, quotable sources, so new pages can surface within weeks — but it moves, so watch it monthly.
AI visibility