The State of AI Visibility
When buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini who to trust, most brands aren't in the answer. This page publishes what 4,344 live AI platform checks and 2,225 crawled pages actually found — citation rates by platform, industry, and content format. The dataset grows every day and these numbers update with it. Cite freely with a link.
The headline numbers
13.6%
overall AI citation rate across 4,344 buyer-question checks on four platforms.
53%
of brands were invisible on ALL four AI platforms for their own buyer questions.
51.7%
of all AI citations point to brands' OWN pages — the #1 source AI cites is your website, when it can read it.
Citation rates by AI platform
Same brands, same buyer questions, four platforms. Perplexity and Gemini cite brands at roughly twice ChatGPT's rate; Claude is the most selective citer of all.
| Platform | Brand cited | Checks | Citation rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 188 | 1,086 | 17.3% |
| Gemini | 187 | 1,086 | 17.2% |
| ChatGPT | 127 | 1,086 | 11.7% |
| Claude | 88 | 1,086 | 8.1% |
AI visibility by industry
Trust-sensitive categories are the most invisible: finance brands are cited in just 2.1% of checks, and 86% of legal & professional-services brands were never cited at all. Meanwhile — the irony writes itself — 70% of marketing agencies are invisible to the AI platforms they advise clients about.
| Industry | Share of dataset | Citation rate | Never cited anywhere |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing & B2B industrial | 3% | 31.2% | 25% |
| Travel & hospitality | 3% | 25.0% | 22% |
| Ecommerce & DTC | 8% | 19.3% | 35% |
| Media, creators & communities | 3% | 18.6% | 56% |
| Health & wellness | 8% | 14.1% | 52% |
| SaaS & software | 31% | 13.2% | 52% |
| Education & coaching | 9% | 11.9% | 48% |
| Local & home services | 6% | 11.7% | 47% |
| Marketing & agencies | 12% | 10.6% | 70% |
| Real estate & construction | 5% | 9.9% | 58% |
| Legal & professional services | 5% | 4.0% | 86% |
| Finance & insurance | 5% | 2.1% | 67% |
Industry classification is model-assisted (Claude Haiku) from each brand's domain and buyer questions; industries below a minimum sample size omitted. Read the smallest cells directionally.
The content formats AI actually cites
Every one of 14,192 citations classified by format. Over half point to brands' own pages— AI's favorite source is the company website itself, which makes the machine-readability gaps below the quietest killer in the dataset. The rest flows through editorial formats where inclusion is earned, not owned.
| Format | Share of citations | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Brand & product pages (companies' own sites) | 51.7% | AI's single biggest source is the brand's own website — when it can read it. |
| Guides & blog posts | 14.3% | How-tos, tutorials, explainers. |
| Listicles & roundups ("best X") | 12.4% | The classic 'best tools for…' format still decides recommendations. |
| Local listings & review profiles | 5.8% | Google Maps/Business Profiles, Yelp, G2, Clutch, app stores. |
| Reference & docs | 3.3% | Wikipedia, documentation, help centers. |
| Social posts | 2.5% | LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X. |
| Comparisons & alternatives | 2.5% | "X vs Y" and alternatives pages. |
| Community threads | 2.3% | Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, forums. |
| News & publisher features | 2.1% | Forbes, trade press, mainstream media. |
| Video | 1.7% | YouTube dominates this slice. |
| Academic & research | 1.4% | Journals, PubMed, .edu. |
The single domains AI cites most
Formats show where citation volume goes; domains show where it concentrates. Reddit appears in AI answers for 56% of audited brands and YouTube for 51%— recurring more often than Forbes and Wikipedia combined. And google.com's count is almost entirely Google Maps business listings (345 of 352 citations): your Business Profile is an AI citation surface, not just a map pin.
| # | Domain | Citations | % of audits where cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | google.com (Maps / Business Profiles) | 352 | 25% |
| 2 | reddit.com | 259 | 56% |
| 3 | youtube.com | 226 | 51% |
| 4 | linkedin.com | 92 | 24% |
| 5 | medium.com | 79 | 17% |
| 6 | facebook.com | 71 | 19% |
| 7 | apps.apple.com | 37 | 5% |
| 8 | forbes.com | 35 | 8% |
| 9 | pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | 31 | 7% |
| 10 | dev.to | 30 | 5% |
| 11 | clutch.co | 29 | 6% |
| 12 | zapier.com | 25 | 4% |
| 13 | en.wikipedia.org | 24 | 6% |
| 14 | yelp.com | 24 | 6% |
Domains cited across ≥8 distinct audits; brand-specific sources excluded.
The machine-readability gap
If half of AI citations go to brands' own pages, readability is the whole game. Of 2,225 pages crawled:
36%
of pages were thin or non-extractable to machine readers.
20.9%
of pages lose their content entirely without JavaScript rendering — invisible to most AI crawlers.
77%
of pages carry no visible date — AI systems can't tell whether the content is current.
What actually moves AI citations (and what doesn't)
Measured to matter
- · Ranking in classic search — rank is upstream of citation
- · Machine-readable owned pages (see 51.7% above)
- · Quotable statistics and concrete numbers on the page
- · Citing your own sources — referenced pages get referenced
- · Presence in the formats above: listicles, guides, reviews, communities
Measured ≈ null (as generic advice)
- · Blanket structured-data markup with no extraction gap to close
- · llms.txt files
- · "AI-optimization" tricks that ignore search fundamentals
We publish what our calibration measured — including the fixes that don't work. Good AEO is good SEO made machine-verifiable.
Questions these numbers answer
What percentage of brands appear in AI answers?
Across 4,344 AI platform checks of real brands' buyer questions, brands were cited in 13.6% of checks. 53% of audited brands were invisible on all four platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini).
Which AI platform cites brands most often?
Perplexity and Gemini cite brands most often (17.3% and 17.2% of checks respectively). ChatGPT cites brands in 11.7% of checks; Claude is the most selective at 8.1%.
What content formats do AI answers cite most?
Brands' own websites are the single biggest source: 51.7% of all citations point to brand and product pages. Guides and blog posts follow at 14.3%, then listicles and roundups at 12.4%. Community threads, social posts, and video are smaller by volume but highly concentrated on a few domains.
Which single domains appear in AI answers most often?
Reddit appears in AI answers for 56% of audited brands and YouTube for 51% — the two most recurring third-party domains, cited more often than Forbes and Wikipedia combined. Google Maps business listings are also a major surface, especially in Gemini answers.
Which industries are most invisible to AI?
Finance & insurance has the lowest citation rate (2.1%) and legal & professional services the highest zero-visibility share (86% of brands never cited). Travel, manufacturing/B2B industrial, and ecommerce brands get cited at the highest rates.
Why are most websites invisible to AI?
Machine-readability explains a lot: of 2,225 pages analyzed, 36% were thin or non-extractable, 77% carried no visible date, and only 21.2% showed author signals. AI systems cite pages they can extract, date, and attribute — and the most-cited format is the brand's own site.
How were these statistics collected?
Every number comes from real, user-requested AI visibility audits run by Boring Marketing's audit engine (July 2026, updated continuously). Each audit asks the buyer questions for that brand's category across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, records every source cited, and crawls the brand's site for machine-readability. Industry and content-format classifications are model-assisted (Claude Haiku) with full coverage of every audited brand and 12,749 distinct cited sources.
Methodology & citing this research
Data source: real, user-requested AI visibility audits run by the Boring Marketing audit engine (July 2026, continuously updated). Each audit generates buyer-intent questions for the brand's category, asks them live across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, records every cited source, and crawls the brand's site for machine-readability signals. Skeleton/test runs excluded. Headline numbers refresh daily from the live dataset; industry and format classifications are model-assisted with full coverage and refreshed periodically. Corrections: vibes@boringmarketing.com.
Cite this page
Boring Marketing, "The State of AI Visibility" (2026-07-06). https://boringmarketing.com/ai-visibility-statistics
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