For years, getting found online meant ranking on Google. That is starting to change. More customers now type a question into an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and get back a short list of names instead of a page of links.
“The biggest shift I’ve seen isn’t a new platform,” said Omar Jenblat, who founded the New York marketing agency BusySeed in 2013. “It’s that the customer stopped searching and started asking. They ask an assistant and get a short list of names.”
How those short lists are put together is still not well understood, and early measurement suggests they are less stable than many business owners assume. BusySeed tracks how the major assistants answer the same buyer questions over time and publishes the results. The studies are self-published and have not been peer reviewed, but they point to three patterns.
The assistants often disagree. In one set of 170,457 answers to 2,500 buyer questions, 88.4% of company recommendations came from only one of the three engines tested. Only 3.2% came from all three. A business that appears on one assistant may not appear on another.
Top picks change often. Across 160 buying questions tracked weekly from April to August 2026, the company an assistant named first for a category changed from one week to the next 56.4% of the time. A single check is a poor measure of how visible a business is.
Strong search performance does not guarantee AI visibility. In a test of the 50 fastest-growing software companies on an Ahrefs list, five never appeared in any answer from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google AI Overviews, and another 10 appeared on some engines but not others. The results are published at https://busyseed.com/research/ahrefs-fastest-growing-ai-visibility.
Outside research offers a clue about what drives inclusion. Ahrefs, which makes SEO software, analyzed 75,000 brands and found that mentions of a company’s name across the web track with AI visibility about three times more closely than backlinks do. What other sites say about a business appears to matter more than how many links point to it.
For business owners, most of the practical steps predate AI. Keep the business name, location and services consistent across the website, Google Business Profile and online directories. Say clearly on the website what the business does and where it operates. Earn mentions from independent sources such as local news, chambers of commerce, trade associations and review sites. When checking results, look at more than one assistant and judge the trend over several weeks rather than a single answer.
Measurement of AI recommendations is still new, and the assistants change how they gather and rank information without notice. No single step guarantees that a business will be named.
