Ask the engines yourself
Open a logged-out or temporary chat, ask the buying questions your customers ask, and repeat each one a few times. Answers shift from run to run, so count how often you are named. Our measurement method shows the full setup.
Annual Industry Report
State of AI Search Visibility 2026
Discover which brands AI recommends most in B2B SaaS. Track AI visibility trends, benchmark competitors, and see where your brand stands in the new era of search.
Project Management Shortlist% of 18 runs
1Asana100
2Trello100
3Jira100
4Basecamp100
5Wrike83
94pts
CRM shortlist gap (100% vs 6%)
1
model tested (Llama 3.3 70B)
54
prompt-runs across 3 SaaS categories
3
SaaS Categories Studied
6
Buying Prompts per Category
1
Model Tested (Llama 3.3 70B)
18
Prompt-Runs per Category
The Definition
What is AI search visibility?
AI search visibility is how often AI assistants and answer engines name, recommend or cite your brand when buyers ask about your category. It is measured per buyer prompt, as the share of answers that include you, not as a position on a results page. This report measures its strictest layer: how often each vendor is actually recommended.
The Benchmark
The AI Search Leaderboard
Which B2B SaaS vendors AI recommends most often in CRM, project management and marketing automation, and which ones it leaves off the shortlist.
Recommendation Frequency by Category: The Measured Layer
The tables below show how often each vendor was actually recommended when we ran standardized buying-intent prompts through Meta's Llama 3.3 70B: six prompts per category, each run three times (18 prompt-runs per category). A brand recommended in every run scores 100%; a brand recommended once scores about 6%. Full prompt sets and scoring are in the Arobis AI Shortlist Study.
CRM Software
Recommendation frequency, 18 prompt-runs
Project Management
Recommendation frequency, 18 prompt-runs
Marketing Automation
Recommendation frequency, 18 prompt-runs
In the CRM category, five vendors were recommended in 100% of buying-intent prompt runs while a functional competitor was recommended in just 6%, a 94-point recommendation gap inside the same question set (Arobis AI Shortlist Study, 2026).
Two patterns repeat in every category we measured. First, AI engines converge on a locked-in shortlist: the leaders are not merely ahead, they are recommended in effectively every run. Second, brand awareness does not buy a seat on that shortlist. Monday.com is a public company with enormous ad spend and scored 67%, behind bootstrapped Basecamp at 100%. Notion, one of the best-known products of the decade, landed at 39%, and ClickUp at just 11%. In a separate measurement of recommendation share, the category leader appeared in roughly two out of every three project-management answers while Notion appeared in about one in six; the full breakdown is in our project management recommendation-share study.
Measurement window: 2026 study runs on Meta's Llama 3.3 70B. Frequencies are per standardized prompt set, not market share.
AI search rankings by category: who gets recommended most
- CRM software: HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Freshsales, Pipedrive and Copper were recommended in 100% of runs, Salesforce in 94% and Dynamics 365 in 83%.
- Project management: Asana, Trello, Jira and Basecamp reached 100%, followed by Wrike at 83% and Monday.com at 67%.
- Marketing automation: HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot and ActiveCampaign reached 100%, followed by Klaviyo at 78% and Mailchimp at 72%.
Free Instant Check
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Analyze My Brand- AI Visibility Score
- Competitor Comparison
- AI Citation Sources
- Share of Model Analysis
- GEO Opportunities
Your Turn
How to check your brand's AI search visibility
Three ways, from free and rough to complete. Whichever you pick, use the questions your buyers ask, not your brand name.
Run the free ChatGPT check
The free ChatGPT Visibility Checker asks ChatGPT five buyer prompts for your category and shows whether you are named, in what position, and who is named instead.
Get the AI Visibility Audit
The $399 Full audit runs 40 buyer prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity and names the competitors that win when you don't. If the gap is real, our AI visibility service for SaaS is built to close it.
The Data
AI Search Visibility Trends: What the 2026 Data Shows
Three shifts define AI search in 2026: answers are replacing clicks, AI referral traffic is compounding, and recommendation share has decoupled from brand awareness. Each trend below is drawn from the published research compiled in our 100 AI search statistics report and from Arobis AI recommendation studies.
58.5%
of US Google searches end without a click (SparkToro, 2024): buyers get their answer on the results page or inside an AI answer.
1.13B+
referral visits from AI platforms to the top 1,000 websites in June 2025, up 357% year-over-year (Similarweb).
23x
higher conversion for AI search visitors than for organic visitors on Ahrefs' own site.
1. Search increasingly resolves without a click
With 58.5% of US Google searches ending without a click, the discovery moment has moved inside the answer itself. For B2B SaaS, that means the shortlist is being written before your site gets a visit: if the engines do not name you, the zero-click buyer never learns you exist. This is why visibility inside answers, not just rankings, has become the metric that predicts pipeline.
2. AI referral traffic is small but compounding, and it converts
AI platforms drove more than 1.13 billion referral visits to the top 1,000 websites in June 2025, up 357% year-over-year, and 44% of AI search users call it their primary source of insight. The volume is still a fraction of Google's, but two properties make it disproportionately valuable: the visitor arrives pre-qualified by a recommendation, and on Ahrefs' own site AI search visitors converted 23x better than organic visitors. Early movers are compounding this advantage while most brands still treat AI answers as a curiosity.
3. Recommendation share has decoupled from brand awareness
The clearest 2026 finding across our own prompt-run studies: how famous a brand is no longer predicts how often AI recommends it. Monday.com, a public company with heavy ad spend, was recommended in 67% of project-management runs, behind bootstrapped Basecamp at 100%. Notion appeared in just 39% of runs despite being one of the most-loved products of the decade. Even at the top, gaps open: our HubSpot vs Salesforce AI visibility study found the two CRM giants split by consistent, repeatable differences in how engines describe and recommend them. Recommendation authority is earned in the sources engines read (review corroboration, category-anchored descriptions, structured data), which is exactly why it can be engineered.
How We Measure
Methodology & Data Sources
Every figure on this page is traceable to a published Arobis AI study or a compiled public benchmark. Nothing is estimated from memory.
How recommendation frequency is measured
For each category we define six standardized buying-intent prompts (the questions real buyers ask, like “best CRM for a small B2B SaaS team”) and run each prompt three times on Meta's Llama 3.3 70B (18 prompt-runs per category). A vendor recommended in every run scores 100%; a vendor recommended once scores about 6%.
Recommendation frequency is deliberately stricter than visibility: a brand can be mentioned in passing yet never actually recommended, so the frequency tables count only the recommendation itself.
Data sources
Category tables come from the Arobis AI Shortlist Study (Meta's Llama 3.3 70B), linked above. Review-signal analysis (e.g. why an 89% would-recommend rate on 2,500+ G2 reviews makes BambooHR a fixture in AI answers) is documented in our HR software study. Market-level statistics are compiled, with original sources, in the 100 AI search statistics report linked in the trends section.
This report is published by Arobis AI, a B2B SaaS agency for AI Search Demand Generation that Ran Yosef founded in 2026.
The Concept
What Is AI Visibility?
AI Visibility measures how often a brand is cited, recommended, mentioned, and surfaced by AI-powered answer engines. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on rankings, AI Visibility focuses on recommendation frequency and citation authority.
Cited
Your domain appears as a source AI links to when it answers buyer questions.
Recommended
AI names your brand first in a shortlist when someone asks for the best tool.
Mentioned
Your name shows up in AI-generated comparisons, summaries, and explanations.
Surfaced
You appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
The Framework
What Impacts AI Visibility?
AI engines weigh dozens of signals when deciding which brands to trust and recommend. These are the factors that move the needle most. Our AI Readiness Report 2026 measures how real websites perform on the on-site half of these signals, from crawler access to structured data, across every scan run through our free checker.
- Brand Mentions
- Authority Signals
- Third-Party Citations
- High-Quality Backlinks
- Product Reviews
- Entity Recognition
- Structured Data
- Topical Authority
- Generative Engine Optimization
The Playbook
How to Improve AI Visibility
A repeatable system for getting cited, trusted, and recommended by AI search engines.
Build Entity Authority
Make your brand unmistakable to AI with a clear, consistent entity footprint.
Earn Authoritative Citations
Get referenced by the high-trust domains AI already relies on.
Strengthen Brand Mentions
Increase the volume and quality of mentions across the open web.
Publish Expert Content
Create answer-ready, semantically rich content AI can quote directly.
Improve Structured Data
Give engines clean, machine-readable signals about what you do.
Track Share of Model
Measure how often AI picks you versus your competitors.
Monitor Continuously
AI answers change weekly. Track and respond before competitors do.
7moves to AI recommendation
Check how ready your site is for AI search in about 25 seconds, free.
Run Free AI Visibility CheckFAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AI Visibility?
AI Visibility is how often and how prominently a brand is cited, recommended, and mentioned by AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews when they answer buyer questions.
How is AI Visibility different from SEO?
Traditional SEO optimizes for ranking pages in search results. AI Visibility optimizes for being selected as the answer, focusing on recommendation frequency and citation authority rather than clicks and positions.
What is Share of Model?
Share of Model measures how often an AI engine names your brand versus competitors for a given set of buyer prompts: your slice of the AI's "mindshare" in your category.
Which AI engines are tracked?
The 2026 edition's prompt runs used one model, Meta's Llama 3.3 70B. Arobis AI audits run on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
How often is the data updated?
Each figure comes from a dated Arobis AI study listed in the methodology section.
Can I compare competitors?
Yes. Run the free AI Visibility Checker on your site and on a competitor's site to compare readiness scores side by side.
What is a good AI search visibility score for a B2B SaaS brand?
There is no universal benchmark, so ask what a score counts. Our free AI Visibility Checker scores how readable your site is for AI, from 0 to 100; in our AI Readiness Report the average website scored 79.7. For recommendations, compare your share of buyer prompt runs with the vendors you meet in deals: in this report the category leaders were recommended in 100% of runs, while Notion sat at 39% and ClickUp at 11%.
Does AI Visibility impact lead generation?
Increasingly, yes. Buyers ask AI for shortlists before they ever visit a website. Being the recommended answer puts your brand in front of demand at the exact moment of decision.
The New Front Door
Is Your Brand Visible in AI Search?
Find out how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity recommend your company.