The Problem With Not Knowing How AI Talks About Your Brand
Most brands have no idea what happens when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about their product category. They don't know if they're mentioned. They don't know if what's said is accurate. They don't know if a competitor gets the recommendation instead.
That's a real blind spot. And it's getting bigger.
I've watched this same pattern repeat across every major technology shift over the past 25 years. A new discovery channel appears. Early movers pay attention. Everyone else catches up 18 months too late. Right now, AI assistants are becoming a primary way people find answers and make decisions. Most brands are still measuring the old thing.
I built the AI Visibility Score Directory to fix that.
What Actually Changes When People Search With AI?
Think about how you used Google five years ago. You typed a query, got a list of links, clicked a few, made a judgment. The brand's job was to rank on that list.
Now think about how people use ChatGPT or Perplexity. They ask a question in plain language and get a direct answer. Sometimes that answer names a brand. Sometimes it recommends one. Sometimes it gets the facts wrong. There's no list of ten blue links to fight over. Just a single, confident response.
That's a completely different dynamic. It requires completely different measurement.
Traditional SEO tools tell you about rankings, clicks, and impressions. None of that applies when an AI assistant gives a direct answer without ever sending the user to your website. The question isn't "where do I rank?" anymore. What matters now is whether the AI knows who you are and whether it recommends you.
That's what the AI Visibility Score measures.
So What Is This Directory, Exactly?
The AI Visibility Score Directory is a public, continuously updated database. It's built from real AI Visibility Score scans that users run on Akii's platform every day. Those scans analyze how major AI systems interpret, reference, and recommend brands in response to actual queries.
We aggregate that data and publish it. Over time, it becomes a longitudinal benchmark. Not a one-time snapshot, but a living record of how AI perception shifts.
Brands, agencies, analysts, and researchers can use it to monitor how AI systems talk about a brand over time, compare visibility against competitors, detect shifts in how AI models interpret a brand, and spot gaps in AI-driven discovery before they become problems.
It's publicly accessible. And it grows every time someone runs a new scan.
Why Should a Brand Care About AI Visibility Right Now?
Here's what I keep hearing from marketers: "We're watching AI search, but we don't know how to measure it yet."
That's honest. It's also exactly the gap this directory fills.
If you run a brand today, a few things are already true. AI assistants are already influencing purchase decisions. They're already recommending products and services. And they're doing it based on how well they understand your brand, not based on your ad spend or your domain authority.
This creates real risks most brands aren't tracking.
You might be invisible. The AI might not mention you at all when someone asks about your category. That's lost discovery you can't see in Google Analytics.
You might be misrepresented. The AI might describe your brand inaccurately. Wrong positioning. Outdated information. Confused with a competitor. That's a trust problem you don't even know you have.
Your competitor might be winning by default. If the AI recommends a competitor and skips you entirely, that's not a ranking issue. That's an existence issue.
The directory makes all of this visible.
How Does the AI Visibility Score Actually Work?
Each brand's score comes from a multi-dimensional methodology. It's not a single number pulled from a single source. Several factors get measured across multiple AI systems.
Brand Understanding. Does the AI model accurately grasp what your brand is and does? Or does it confuse you with something else?
Citation Frequency. How often does your brand show up in AI responses to relevant queries?
Recommendation Strength. When the AI mentions you, does it actually recommend you? Or just list you as one option among many?
Comparative Visibility. How often do you appear versus your direct competitors in the same response?
Factual Accuracy. When the AI talks about your brand, is it getting the facts right?
All of this comes from real AI queries and responses. Not simulations. Not projections. Actual data from how these systems behave when people ask them questions.
Clicks and impressions tell you about traffic. The AI Visibility Score tells you about perception. That's a different thing entirely.
How Is This Different From a One-Time Audit?
A lot of brands have started doing one-off checks. They'll ask ChatGPT about their brand, screenshot the response, and share it in a Slack channel. That's a start. It's not measurement.
One response from one model on one day tells you almost nothing. AI models change constantly. Their training data updates. Their response patterns shift. What ChatGPT says about your brand today might be different from what it says next month.
The directory solves this by tracking visibility over time. You can see trends. You can see whether your visibility is improving, declining, or staying flat. You can see how a product launch or a PR crisis affects how AI systems talk about you.
A one-time audit is a photograph. The directory is a time-lapse. That distinction matters when the thing you're measuring keeps moving.
Who Is This Built For?
I built Akii for people who run businesses and need to make decisions. Not for people who want another dashboard to stare at.
The directory is useful for several groups.
Brand leaders who need to understand a new discovery channel that's growing fast and isn't captured by existing tools.
Marketing teams who want to inform their strategy with real data about how AI systems perceive their brand versus competitors.
Agencies who need to show clients something concrete about AI visibility, not just theory.
Analysts and researchers who want access to longitudinal data about AI brand perception across multiple models.
If you're responsible for how your brand shows up in the world, this matters to you. The channels are shifting. The directory helps you see where things actually stand.
What Can You Actually Do With This Data?
Let me be specific, because I don't believe in data for data's sake.
Benchmark your starting point. Before you can improve AI visibility, you need to know where you are. The directory gives you that baseline across multiple AI systems.
Identify gaps. Maybe you're visible in ChatGPT but invisible in Perplexity. Maybe your competitor gets recommended in Claude but you don't. These gaps are specific and worth acting on.
Track the impact of your work. Update your content strategy, adjust your public information, or ship a new product, then watch how it affects your AI visibility over time.
Make the case internally. If you're trying to get budget or attention for AI-forward marketing, real data about your brand's AI visibility is a lot more convincing than a theory about where search is heading.
Inform content and positioning decisions. If the AI misunderstands your brand positioning, that tells you something about how your brand information is structured and distributed. You can fix that.
Is This Like Nielsen Ratings for AI?
That's the closest analogy I've found. Nielsen gave the media industry a common standard for measuring audience attention. Before Nielsen, everyone was guessing. After Nielsen, you could compare, benchmark, and make decisions based on shared data.
The AI Visibility Score Directory does something similar for brand perception in AI systems. It creates a shared, public benchmark that everyone can reference. It's not proprietary data locked behind a paywall. It's a growing resource that gets more useful as more scans are performed.
A common benchmark is necessary right now. The shift to AI-driven discovery is happening fast, and most of the industry is still measuring the old channels. Shared standards help everyone get oriented faster.
What Happens If You Ignore This?
I'll be direct. You can ignore AI visibility for a while and probably not notice the impact. Traditional search still drives traffic. Your existing channels still work. Nothing feels broken yet.
That's how every major shift works. The old thing keeps working until it doesn't. By the time you notice the decline, the early movers have already built their position in the new channel.
I've seen this with the web itself, with mobile, with social, with voice. The pattern is always the same. Brands that pay attention early don't just survive the transition. They come out ahead because they understood the new rules while everyone else was still playing by the old ones.
AI-driven discovery is the next version of this pattern. The question isn't whether it will matter. It's whether you'll be ready when it does.
Where to Start
If you want to see where your brand stands, the AI Visibility Score Directory is live and publicly accessible. You can look up brands, compare competitors, and see how AI perception is tracking over time.
If you want to go deeper, run your own AI Visibility Score scan on Akii's platform and get a detailed breakdown of how major AI systems perceive your brand right now.
You can also explore the full set of features we've built around AI search intelligence, or check out pricing if you're ready to make this part of your ongoing measurement.
The shift is happening. The data is available. What you do with it is up to you.
