I scored 100 businesses on whether AI actually recommends them. Big brands are losing to indies.

zeb choudhry — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:10:26 +0000

Classic SEO measures whether you rank on Google. But AI answers are quietly eating the ten blue links, and that raises a different question with different signals: when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude or Google AI for a recommendation, can the model actually understand, trust and cite your business?

I wanted real data instead of vibes, so I ran a controlled audit of 100 businesses — 25 local, 25 national, 25 international, 25 niche B2B/SaaS — scoring how well each site gives AI systems what they need to recommend it. (Audit date: 2026-05-31.)

Full disclosure up front: I build a tool that does this scoring (GetVisus). But this post is the data and the takeaways, not a pitch — you can act on every finding here without any tool.

The surprising part: brand size didn't save anyone

Bold Street Coffee, Mowgli, a local charity → 100/100
Pret A Manger → 32. Greggs → 52. giffgaff → 53. Smarty → 29
A well-known local venue → 14/100

Category averages:

Category	Avg score
International	91.5
B2B / niche SaaS	81.1
Local	79.8
National brands	75.5 (worst)

Big national brands often have beautiful, JS-heavy sites that are hard for an LLM to extract facts from — while a tiny coffee shop with a clear, text-first page wins outright.

The most common problems (out of 100)

Problem	How many sites
No FAQ / no answer-ready sections	79
Reviews/testimonials not visible as on-page text	70
Pricing not visible	49
Business not recommended for its own core prompt	29
About / who-you-are unclear	27
Weak or missing structured data	9

What actually moves the needle (all free to do)

Put a real FAQ / Q&A block on key pages, phrased the way customers actually ask. Answer-ready text is the single biggest gap.
Show reviews and testimonials as text on the page — not just a Trustpilot logo an LLM can't read.
Make pricing, or at least a price range/scope, visible. "Contact us" tells an AI nothing.
Make the entity obvious: who you are, what you sell, who it's for, where you operate — in plain text near the top.
Add basic schema (Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQ) — but only for facts that are visible on the page.

The pattern across every 100/100 site was identical: the business entity, the offer, the proof, and the "who it's for" boundaries were all trivially easy to extract. The low scorers made the AI guess — and models don't guess in your favour.

The honest caveat

This is a directional benchmark on a controlled sample, not a market-wide study, and not proof of exact revenue causation. The scoring reflects a model of what LLMs reward, not ground-truth from the model providers. But as AI answers replace the classic search results, "can an LLM cite you?" is becoming a real commercial question — and most sites, including big ones, are quietly failing it.

Full methodology and the 100-row dataset are in the benchmark report. Happy to answer methodology questions in the comments.

I built a free AI visibility audit tool — then audited ourselves. Here's what happened.

zeb choudhry — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:36:36 +0000

Originally published at getvisus.com
Six months ago I started building Visus — a free tool that scores websites on how easily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI can find and recommend them.
The idea came from a problem I saw firsthand. My wife owns Fozias, a Kashmiri restaurant in Liverpool. Despite great food, loyal customers and positive reviews, the restaurant was completely invisible when anyone asked an AI engine for restaurant recommendations in Liverpool. ChatGPT didn't mention it. Perplexity didn't mention it. It simply didn't exist in the AI world.
So I built Visus to diagnose exactly why — and fix it.
The Fozias experiment
Before any optimisation, Fozias scored 23 out of 100 on the Visus AI visibility audit. The problems were clear:

No schema markup telling AI engines what the business was
No FAQ content matching the questions people ask AI
Inconsistent business listings across directories
No llms.txt file allowing AI crawlers access
Weak entity definition — AI engines couldn't confidently identify what Fozias was

We fixed every one of those issues. Ninety days later Fozias scored 80 out of 100. They became the number one Perplexity result for Kashmiri restaurants in Liverpool. ChatGPT now includes them in dining recommendations for Liverpool.
That's a real restaurant. Real customers. Real results.
Then we audited ourselves
Last week I ran getvisus.com through its own audit. We scored 35 out of 100.
That was humbling. We had built a tool to help businesses become visible to AI — and our own product was largely invisible.
The problems Visus found on our own site:

Canonical URL inconsistency between two domains
No llms.txt file
Missing FAQ schema markup
Thin crawlable content — React apps are hard for AI crawlers to read
No external citations from trusted sources

We fixed everything in one session. Added comprehensive schema markup including SoftwareApplication, Organization, WebSite and FAQPage schemas. Created a detailed llms.txt file. Fixed all canonical URLs. Added eight FAQ entries covering every question someone might ask an AI about Visus.
The new score: 76 out of 100.
A 41 point improvement in one session.
What we learned
AI visibility is not the same as Google SEO. You can rank on Google and be completely invisible to ChatGPT and Perplexity simultaneously. They have different signals, different trust mechanisms, and different ways of deciding who to recommend.
The businesses that act now — while most of their competitors are still ignoring AI search — will own those recommendations for years. The ones that wait will spend significantly more trying to catch up.
The five things that matter most for AI visibility:

Schema markup — tell AI engines exactly what your business is in machine-readable format
FAQ content — answer the specific questions people ask AI engines about your category
Entity consistency — your business name, address and description must be identical everywhere
External citations — trusted third-party sources mentioning your business build AI confidence
llms.txt — a simple file that tells AI crawlers everything they need to know about you

Try it on your own site
Visus is free. No signup. No credit card. Enter your URL and get your score in under 60 seconds.
If you score below 50 — and most businesses do — you are largely invisible to AI search right now. Your competitors who fix this first will take the recommendations you should be getting.
getvisus.com
Built in Liverpool. Helping local businesses get found by AI.