Practical Experiments in AI Search Visibility
Practical experiments examining how brands, products and websites appear in AI-generated answers. These tests explore recommendation variability, mentions, citations and share of voice across repeated searches.
Sometimes an AI answer is weak because important information is missing. But sometimes the information is already there. The facts exist. The sources exist. The problem is the conclusion drawn from them. We have started thinking of this as an Interpretation Gap. An Interpretation Gap occurs when the relevant facts are available, but the conclusion … Read more
If dozens of credible webpages say roughly the same thing and one page says something different, which information is an AI search engine more likely to use? At first glance, the answer seems obvious. The majority view has weight. There are more sources supporting it, more repetition around it and more evidence that the conclusion … Read more
A webpage can be: and still never be selected as a source in an AI-generated answer. We saw this clearly in a recent Google AI Mode experiment. We created a resource specifically addressing a question we had already tested, confirmed that Google had indexed it, and then repeated the original query ten times. The new … Read more
We published a page specifically designed to answer a question we had already tested in Google AI Mode. Google Search Console confirmed that the page was indexed within roughly ten minutes of our indexing request. We then repeated the original query ten times. AI Mode did not cite the page once. We made the user’s … Read more
If you want to know whether your business is visible in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT or another AI search tool, running a query once is rarely enough. AI-generated answers can change. A business that appears in one response may disappear from the next. Competitors can change, citations can change and even the way your business … Read more
Before running this experiment, we identified Clarendon Dental Spa as the Leeds practice whose website appeared to match a detailed customer requirement most completely. We then submitted the same query to Google AI Mode five times. Clarendon was recommended in every response. It ranked first three times and second twice. This does not prove that … Read more
An unbranded AI visibility test asks whether Google independently recommends your business for a particular customer need. But what if the business does not appear? That result alone cannot tell you whether Google lacks information about the business, misunderstands its offer or can recognise its suitability when prompted but chooses other businesses in an unbranded … Read more
Businesses cannot currently obtain a reliable list of every long conversational question people ask in Google AI Mode. Fortunately, they may not need one. AI visibility can be tested around commercially important customer needs rather than exact long-tail queries. The aim is not to predict every sentence a potential customer might type. It is to … Read more
When someone asks Google to recommend a business, how many businesses is it really choosing between? We explored that question by giving Google AI Mode a detailed request for an accountancy firm: I run a small manufacturing company in Birmingham with 25 employees. I need an accountancy firm to handle year-end accounts, corporation tax, payroll … Read more
If a business appears regularly in AI recommendations, does that mean it is being positioned equally strongly across different AI platforms? I tested this by asking Google AI Mode and ChatGPT exactly the same buying question five times each. The clearest result was this: Firm Google recommended Google ranked first ChatGPT recommended ChatGPT ranked first … Read more