Since the onset of the internet, brands have been fighting to optimize their spot in search engines, getting as close to the top of any given page of Google results as possible. But in the AI age, traditional search engines are falling by the wayside—and with them, more than one in four brands are becoming completely invisible, says a new report.
The 2026 AI Visibility Index, an inaugural report from the strategic communications firm Lucie Content, assessed how many businesses are being recommended by artificial intelligence chatbots. Showing up in AI responses has never been more important for brands; a 2026 report from BrightLocal found that 45% of consumers now turn to AI for business recommendations, a massive jump from just 6% in 2025.
How can you make sure you’re not the odd brand out when it comes to AI visibility? Beyond offering a glimpse into the current state of AI as a search engine, Lucie’s report comes with tips, and a tool, for assessing any company’s AI visibility.
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is the measure of how often AI chatbots will cite or recommend a given business, along with how accurately it will be described. For its assessment, Lucie simulated realistic customer queries, then measured how often a business appeared in the AI model’s responses. It also tracked whether the AI model’s description of the business was accurate, whether it understood the business’s category, and what businesses it recommended instead.
Craig Lucie, founder and CEO of Lucie Content, explained the rationale for the company’s research in a press release.
“Search used to be a list of 10 links, and you decided where to click,” he said. “AI gives you one confident answer with only a few names in it. If your business isn’t one of those names, you’re not just losing to your competitors—you aren’t even in the running. And what we learned through our research is that most business owners don’t realize this is happening.”
Lucie’s results
Lucie Content ran 94 businesses through three different brand-blind scenarios in Gemini’s consistency mode. It ran each scenario three times, resulting in 894 queries that informed the report’s findings.
More than one in four businesses (26.6%) never appeared in any of the tested scenarios. But the report also found that there’s almost no middle ground when it comes to AI visibility: 84% of the companies in the sample scored either a zero or a 100 on retrieval, meaning a given company either consistently appeared in results or didn’t appear at all.
The report also saw almost zero correlation between being visible in traditional search engines and showing up in AI responses. Of the 90 companies in the study’s sample with a Google eligibility score of 70 or above, 24 still had zero AI visibility. Independent research confirmed that there’s only a 45% correlation between top performers in Google search results and in AI recommendations.
How to check your AI visibility
Lucie also launched a free tool with the release of its report, where brands can run an AI visibility scan for themselves on models including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. But the tool returns a brand’s score only on one of the six modules Lucie tested for—technical readiness. More info can be had through a “teaser report,” and the full assessment is available through a consultation with Lucie.
But the report’s experiment is also repeatable on a small scale by individual brands. Though Lucie’s full methodology is under wraps, its general strategy of simulating and repeating realistic customer queries can help brands get a sense of their own standing when it comes to being recommended by AI.
If a brand is getting passed over in AI responses, where should it look to improve? In its press release, Lucie Content identified “clear, consistent, and factually supported information, combined with strong video and imagery that helps both people and machines understand and verify the business” as key factors in AI visibility. Lucie, the CEO, says the firm applied these improvements to its own business model and saw results.
“The great news about what our research found is that the problem is fixable,” he said. “We tested this on our own company before we tested a single client—and measurably improved our own visibility.”