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.

The Scale of the Problem

Running 4,500+ prompts across 349 brands gives us enough data to say this with confidence: the majority of UK businesses are invisible to AI assistants in commercially relevant conversations.

This is not a niche concern. AI-assisted purchasing decisions are growing rapidly. When a procurement manager asks ChatGPT to recommend suppliers, when a consumer asks Google AI Overview for the best product in a category, when a business owner asks Perplexity which service provider to use, the brands that appear in those responses capture attention and pipeline. The brands that do not appear lose opportunities they never knew existed.

The gap between visible and invisible brands will only widen. AI models learn from the content that already works, reinforcing the brands that are structured for citation and further marginalising those that are not.

What Businesses Should Do Next

If your brand is in the majority, the invisible 67%, the path forward is not complicated, but it does require a different approach to content than traditional SEO:

• Audit your AI visibility now. Run your key buying-intent prompts through ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity. See whether your brand appears and what competitors are being recommended instead.
• Structure content for citation. Write clear entity definitions, publish comparison content, and ensure your brand name appears prominently throughout your pages.
• Cover all three buying stages. Do not just optimise for informational queries. Build content that addresses comparison and transactional prompts where purchasing decisions are actually made.
• Measure regularly. AI responses change as models are updated. Monthly monitoring is the minimum to track whether your visibility is improving or declining.

The data from 4,500 prompts tells a clear story. Most brands are invisible to AI, and most do not realise it yet. The ones that act now will have a significant head start as AI-assisted purchasing becomes the norm.

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Further Reading

• Manufacturing and AI Visibility: What 43 Brands and 340 Prompts Tell Us About the Sector
• Why B2B Brands Are Almost Entirely Invisible to AI (And What the Exceptions Did Differently)
• ChatGPT and Google AI Give Completely Different Answers. Your Brand Might Only Exist on One.

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