The AI Visibility Index 2026

5-factor breakdown

Engines mention brands but almost never link to them

Pondral scores every AI response on five factors. The averages across all 8,215 results reveal a clear pattern: brands get mentioned (Presence 71.7) and described fairly (Context 66.2). But citation links, where the engine actually points users to a brand's site, score just 25.7 out of 100.

The full report

What the 2026 Index actually shows

The tables above are the data. This is what they mean, measured from the 8,215 scored results on the same published methodology (v2.0.3) the platform runs for any brand.

The headline

Across 200 brands and five AI assistants, the average AI Visibility score is 55.8 out of 100 (95% confidence interval 53.6 to 58.1). Most brands are neither invisible nor winning. The middle half of the field sits between 42.7 and 69.0, the most common band is 61 to 70 (45 brands), no brand scores above 90, and only one scores below 20. It is a crowded middle with nobody pulling away. Brands get mentioned, then lose the answer on the details that decide whether a buyer ever reaches them. The clearest pattern is that they show up in the conversation but rarely earn a link back to their own site.

Score distribution across all 200brands. The field clusters in the 61–70 band; no brand scores above 90 and only one scores below 20.

Industry decides most of your starting line

B2B SaaS averages 67.9. Local services and franchises average 45.4, a 22-point gap before any single brand does anything differently. SaaS is also the most consistent vertical (standard deviation 9.1), while e-commerce is the widest spread (18.3) and holds both the second-highest brand in the Index (84.5) and the lowest-scoring one (17.3). The extremes are clearly separated, but the three middle verticals overlap: financial services, professional services, and e-commerce have overlapping confidence intervals and read as a cluster, not a strict ranking. One measure of how much the category sets your starting line: the weakest SaaS brand in the set (47.0) still outscores the average local-services brand (45.4). A likely reason is that SaaS categories are documented in the structured, comparative content assistants quote, while local and franchise categories are thinner, but the Index measures the outcome, not the cause. Either way, the material an engine can cite is something you can change.

The engines disagree about you

Grok scores brands highest on average, at 60.8. Gemini scores them lowest, at 50.7. The same brand can land very differently depending on which assistant answers: across engines the scores correlate only weakly, with pairwise correlations between about 0.19 and 0.33 (the closest pair, Claude and Perplexity, is 0.33). A check against one engine tells you about that engine, not about your overall AI Visibility. That is why the Index measures five, and why a single-engine tool can leave you confident and wrong.

Cross-engine score correlation. Values well below 1.0 mean the engines rank brands differently, so the same brand can score high on one and low on another.

The citation-link gap is the real problem

Brands score 71.7 on Presence, so they do get mentioned. They score 25.7 on Citation Link, the factor that measures whether the engine actually points the reader to the brand's own site. That gap is the single biggest drag on overall scores, and Citation Link is the factor a brand has the most direct control over. A mention with no link is a near miss: the buyer hears your name and still clicks through to someone else.

What separates the top from the bottom

Wise leads the Index at 88.5. Liquid IV sits at the bottom at 17.3, a 71-point spread. The brands at the top are not always the biggest companies. They are the ones that show up consistently in the sources AI engines trust and get linked as a source instead of just named. The brands at the bottom are usually missing from those sources, or confused with something else.

What to do about it

The work that moves these scores is concrete. Publish structured, comparative content an engine can quote directly. Keep your entity details consistent across the web so engines do not confuse you with a competitor, and earn citations from the sources each engine already trusts in your category. Start with Citation Link, because it is the lowest score and the most fixable. Then measure again, because the engines change and competitors keep publishing.