AI Visibility Report · 2026 · Original research
What AI actually sees
Four organizations, one AI visibility study: an agency, a nonprofit, an art gallery and a SaaS startup. Client identities are anonymized. Bot traffic data comes from real monitored logs.
36,469
queries monitored over 87 days
1,471
citations across all platforms
74.1%
of citations came from ChatGPT
2 of 5
average topics producing citations
Findings
Content structure is key.
All four organizations had the same problems. Citations came from only one or two topics, Perplexity bots were blocked and Claude’s live assistant was partly blocked. Content structure predicted mention rate better than brand size or industry.
Seven recommendations, in order of impact
Fix crawler access first
Allow the AI search crawlers and live fetchers: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User.
Audit robots.txt, CDN and WAF
Each one can block crawlers on its own.
Map zero-citation topics
Every client had a commercially important topic with no citations at all.
Reformat for AI extraction
Answer in the first 150 words, use question headings, make declarative claims.
Add geographic specificity
Location queries only cited content that named the location.
Build third-party presence
Perplexity cites third-party sources, not brand pages.
Track AI referrals now
Set a baseline before you change anything.
Get the full report, and the pilot program results.
The full report covers citation sources by platform, crawler access, AI traffic compared with Google, the paid AI layer and agentic commerce.