We Ran 4,500 AI Prompts Across 349 Brands. Two-Thirds Are Invisible.

There is a question most businesses have never thought to ask: when someone types a buying query into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overview, does your brand get mentioned? We decided to find out. Over the past three months, Contxt ran a large-scale analysis across 40 businesses and their 309 named competitors, covering 349 brands in total. We executed over 4,500 individual prompt executions across multiple AI platforms, testing 30 commercially-focused prompts per business, split equally across three intent categories: informational, comparison, and transactional. The results paint a stark picture of the AI visibility landscape in 2026. Two-thirds of the brands we analysed are effectively invisible. The Numbers Behind the Study Before we get into the findings, here is the scale of what we measured: 40 businesses analysed across a wide range of UK sectors 309 competitor brands tracked alongside those businesses 349 total brands in the dataset 61 completed brand analyses, each running 30 prompts 70 tracker runs monitoring visibility over time Over 4,500 individual prompt executions across ChatGPT and Google AI Overview Every analysis used the same methodology: 10 informational prompts (research-stage queries), 10 comparison prompts (evaluation-stage queries), and 10 transactional prompts (decision-stage queries). This three-phase distribution mirrors how real buyers move from initial research through to purchase. Each brand analysis runs 30 prompts split equally across three buying stages 67% of Brands Score Below 20% Visibility on ChatGPT Of the 33 brands with completed multi-platform analyses, 22 scored below 20% visibility on ChatGPT. That means when we ran 30 buying-intent prompts specific to their industry, the AI mentioned them in fewer than 6 out of 30 responses. Eight brands scored 0%. Completely invisible. Not mentioned once across 30 commercially relevant prompts. These were not obscure startups. They included a national retail chain, an established pet