---
title: "What AI actually sees: 2026 AI visibility report"
description: "What AI actually sees: a 2026 study of four organizations, 36,469 monitored AI queries and 1,471 citations over 87 days. 74.1% of citations came from ChatGPT."
url: "https://emblitstein.com/resources/2026-visibility-report/"
markdown_url: "https://emblitstein.com/resources/2026-visibility-report/index.html.md"
updated: 2026-11-05
lang: "en-US"
---

# What AI actually sees: 2026 visibility report

> 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.

## Key numbers

- 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 produced citations

## Findings

Content structure is key. It predicted mention rate better than brand size or industry.

| Client | Queries | Citations | Mention rate |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| A · Regional marketing agency | 12,764 | 456 | 3.57% |
| B · Regional nonprofit | 8,847 | 362 | 4.09% |
| C · Contemporary art gallery | 5,218 | 90 | 1.72% |
| D · B2B SaaS startup | 9,640 | 563 | 5.84% |
| Combined | 36,469 | 1,471 | 4.03% |

[Download the report data as CSV](https://emblitstein.com/resources/2026-visibility-report/data.csv)

## Seven recommendations, in order of impact

1. Fix crawler access first: allow the AI search crawlers and live fetchers (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User).
2. Audit robots.txt, CDN and WAF. Each one can block crawlers on its own.
3. Map zero-citation topics.
4. Reformat for AI extraction: answer in the first 150 words, use question headings, make declarative claims.
5. Add geographic specificity.
6. Build third-party presence.
7. Track AI referrals now, before you change anything.