What actually gets a business named by AI

We ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI the questions real buyers ask, for 1,069 real businesses, and score six readiness signals against who actually gets named. This page recomputes from the live index on every visit — measured, not estimated. One signal decides it, and it isn't the one the SEO industry sells.

 AI names them (239) AI ignores them (407)

Brand — off-page recognition48-point gap

88

40

The whole story. How many independent sites talk about you, whether the engines already know you as a real entity. This is the one that moves.

E-E-A-T — trust & credentials11-point gap

78

67

Technical SEO3-point gap

80

77

Flat. The invisible businesses are as technically sound as the named ones. Speed and crawlability don't get you named.

Schema / structured data3-point gap

72

69

Also flat — structured data helps AI read you; it doesn't make AI recommend you.

Off-page brand recognition is the only signal that separates being named from being ignored. AI recommends businesses it has seen talked about across the open web — not the ones with the cleanest markup. You can't schema your way onto the shortlist.

Most businesses are barely there

22% named
40% occasional
38% invisible

38% of the businesses we measure are effectively invisible to AI — scoring near zero when a customer asks the engines who to trust. Most owners have never checked once.

Where AI gets the mentions it trusts is mapped, per industry, on the citation-source maps — and every category leaderboard lives on the live AI Visibility Index.

See where your business stands.

Free, 60 seconds, no signup. We'll show you whether AI names you — and the one lever that moves it.

Run your free scan →

Method: 1,069 distinct businesses (deduped by domain — each counted once, on its best clean measurement), each measured across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI with the real buyer questions for its category, multi-sampled with majority voting. Signal scores are our six-dimension AI-readiness model (0–100). Named / occasional / invisible = visibility ≥60 / 25–59 / <25. Figures recompute live from the index. Open methodology: github.com/techhorizonlabs/thl-open.

Method. Found by AI asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI the questions real buyers ask for each category, then measures which businesses the engines actually name. Scores are 0–100 point-in-time measurements; the index re-scans and grows automatically. Businesses listed here were selected and measured by us from public directories — scan your own site free to see where you'd rank. Queries and methodology are open: github.com/techhorizonlabs.