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.
Top comments (3)
The findings highlight the need for brands to adapt their visibility strategies in an AI-driven landscape. Smaller businesses are leveraging niche positioning and authenticity, which AI algorithms may favor. Analyzing user engagement metrics and content relevance could further explain this shift.
thank you for your insights, I am sure that I am onto something
wild that brand size doesn't actually matter for llm recommendations. makes me wonder if traditional seo is just becoming obsolete lol