Ask an AI to recommend a local firm: 1,016 of 1,371 are never named

For each index we ask an AI assistant the questions a customer would ask — who are the best builders in Gloucester, which accountant should I use in Cheltenham — and record which businesses get named.

1016 of 1371 are never named once. The median AI search presence score across every business we measure is 0.

This is the newest pillar and the most one-sided. On every other measure, local businesses cluster somewhere in the middle. Here, most of them are simply absent from the answer.

Why this matters more than it looks

When someone asks an assistant to recommend a local firm, they do not get ten results to choose between. They get two or three names. Being the fourth-best answer is the same as not existing, which is a harsher distribution than search has ever had.

And the businesses that do get named are not a random sample. Only 36 of 1371 score full marks, so this is not a case of a few winners and a long tail — it is a case of a handful of firms being the answer for everybody.

What the assistants appear to be drawing on

Stated carefully, because we measure the output rather than the mechanism, and no one outside these companies knows the retrieval in detail. What is observable from our data:

Businesses named tend to have substantive, crawlable pages about the specific service rather than a single page listing everything. That is the same pattern the Visibility pillar rewards.

They tend to be described somewhere other than their own website — directories, local press, professional registers. An assistant assembling an answer has more to work with when independent sources corroborate what a business does.

Structured data helps them be understood — a machine-readable statement of what the business is, where, and what it offers. See schema markup.

What we can say with confidence is the negative: being invisible here is not explained by having a bad website. Median Technical across the same businesses is 88. The sites are fine. They are just not part of the answer.

What to do

The practical work is generative engine optimisation, and it overlaps heavily with ordinary topical work rather than being a separate discipline: say clearly what you do, where, and for whom; put it on pages a machine can read; get corroborated by sources that are not you.

The honest caveat is that this is one quarter of one region, measured against a fixed prompt set. Answer engines change fast, and we publish every prompt we use so the measurement can be argued with.

The wider point

This pillar is 15% of the Digital Visibility Score, and it is the one where the gap between “your website is fine” and “customers find you” is widest. A business can pass every technical check, load fast, have a complete Google profile — and still not exist to someone who asks a machine for a recommendation.

See where your sector stands: browse the indices.

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Figures recomputed at build time from the published datasets, 1371 businesses across the South West.