How AI systems decide which companies buyers see.
The Answerability Index measures exactly that — who AI systems surface when buyers ask high-intent questions across industries, how concentrated each market is, and where visibility is still contestable.
5 AI systems · 4 industries · observed behavior, not rankings.
A measurement system, not a ranking.
We don't decide who's best. We observe which companies five AI systems actually name when buyers ask real questions — then measure how much the engines agree.
- Run a fixed set of buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok.
- Record every company each engine names, over repeated runs.
- Measure overlap — how often the engines name the same companies.
- Classify the market's structure from that overlap pattern.
- Publish the observed behavior, with the prompts and counts behind it.
The overlap score runs 0.00–1.00. 1.00 means the engines fully agree on which companies belong in the answer; 0.00 means they share none. It's the single number behind every market type below.
AI builds the shortlist before the website visit.
More buyers now open a research question with an AI system instead of a search box. By the time they reach anyone's website, the consideration set is often already drawn. If your company isn't in the answer, it isn't on the list — and you rarely get to know it happened.
Frozen, molten, fragmented.
Every market we measure falls into one of three structures — and each one creates a different visibility problem.
What it means: incumbents hold a structural moat — you can't optimize your way in.
What it means: visibility is contestable — retrieval, entity clarity, and answer-shaped content change who gets named.
What it means: different buyers see different firms — you win territories, not keywords.
Most markets we've studied are still contestable — molten or fragmented — not frozen.
What it looks like across markets.
These examples aren't rankings — they show how different market structures create different visibility problems. Each links to the full analysis.
Airlines
Frozen · Overlap 0.64All five engines converge on Delta, United, and American — recommendation behavior locks around a handful of dominant brands.
The market is settled. Big, well-corroborated brands dominate the AI conversation consistently — you can't tune your way in.
Industrial machinery
Molten · Overlap 0.34Only Caterpillar is a consensus pick. Ask for "leading US industrial companies" and the engines return Komatsu, Siemens, ABB — an open field.
The market is still forming. Visibility is contestable — retrieval, entity clarity, and answer-shaped content can change who gets named.
LA wealth management
Fragmented · splits by buyer244 firms named, and 93% are local RIAs Google never shows. A founder, a physician, and a $10M family get sent to almost entirely different firms.
There's no single answer because there's no single buyer. AI builds a different consideration set for each archetype — win the territory, not the keyword.
Commercial insurance brokers
Molten · Overlap 0.3872 brokers named, near-zero agreement. A startup buying cyber is steered to insurtechs; a mid-market manufacturer gets the global giants.
No broker owns the answer, and the leader flips by engine — visibility is contestable line by line, not locked.
Which problem sounds like yours?
From research to results.
Research tells you how your market behaves. A Diagnostic tells you how you behave inside it. Most clients start with the Diagnostic — which then keeps running as monthly Visibility Intelligence — and bring in a Sprint or a custom engagement when they want the fixes built.
- Baseline score, retrieval inventory, competitor & territory analysis
- Excel playbook + two deploy-ready example pages
- Then monthly: a delta report, refreshed playbook & two more pages
- $2,500 first month, then $950/mo — cancel anytime
Monthly during active build periods; quarterly once visibility stabilizes.
- Surfaces built
- Trust & retrieval improvements
- Hands-on implementation
- We implement on your site
- Larger or ongoing scope
- Scoped to you
See where AI routes your buyers.
The AI Visibility Diagnostic runs your buyers' real questions across all five engines and scores every cited source — so you can see where you're surfaced, where a competitor is named instead, and what moves it.
Not ready? Read the field report first →