Agent Visibility Playbook: Get Recommended by AI

Chapter 1What Is Agent Visibility

Agent visibility is your brand's presence in AI-generated recommendations. When a potential customer asks an AI agent “What's the best CRM for small businesses?” or “Best running shoes under $150?”, does your product appear in the answer?

This isn't SEO. It's not SEM. It's an entirely new surface where purchase decisions are being made, and most brands have zero strategy for it. The rules are different, the signals are different, and the winners will be decided in the next 12-18 months.

Those numbers are ours, not an industry estimate. They come from the Brand Index, our own public measurement of how often assistants name DTC brands when a shopper asks what to buy in their category. The registry is 72 brands, and 6 of them could not be read at all, returning 403 to every request we made. A score is only published once at least two assistants have answered at least four questions, and a brand below that floor is withheld rather than shown at zero, so how many carry a score moves with every run. That count, and how many of the scored brands were never named once, are on the index itself, counted from the same run that publishes the table rather than copied into this page. Method, floors and refusals are documented at the index methodology. The two figures printed above are the size of the registry and the number of stores in it that refuse us, so they hold until the registry changes. Everything measured per run moves daily, which is why it is linked rather than printed.

The findings from that run are written up separately, including which brands were never named once: we asked four AI assistants what to buy.

How the questions are generated, why a score is withheld below the floor, and what the index refuses to claim are set out in what the Brand Index measures.

The asymmetry is the point. In traditional SEO every brand in a category is competing for the same rankings, and has been for twenty years. In agent visibility, a measurable share of the field is not competing at all: the 6 unreadable brands above are not losing this race, they are not in it, and nothing in their own analytics would tell them so. That is a different starting position from an SEO contest, and it is why the work in the next five chapters compounds rather than merely keeping pace.

Chapter 2Measuring Current Visibility

Before you can improve agent visibility, you need to know where you stand. This requires systematic querying of AI agents with purchase-intent prompts relevant to your category, and it resolves to one number: your agent mention rate against a fixed question bank.

1. 1

   Build a query bank

   Create 50-100 purchase-intent queries that potential customers would ask. Include category-level ('best CRM software'), comparison ('HubSpot vs Salesforce'), and specific ('CRM for 20-person team under $50/seat') queries.

2. 2

   Query all four major platforms

   Run each query through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Record whether your brand appears, its position in the list, and the sentiment of the mention.

3. 3

   Calculate your mention rate

   Mention rate = (queries where you appear / total queries) x 100. Track this separately by platform, query type, and competitor.

4. 4

   Assess mention quality

   Not all mentions are equal. A top recommendation with a detailed explanation is worth more than a passing mention at the end of a list. Score each mention from 1-5.

Chapter 3The 7 Levers for Improvement

Improving agent visibility isn't about gaming AI systems. It's about making your brand the most informative, credible, and easily synthesizable option in your category. Here are the seven levers:

Chapter 4Competitive Intelligence

Understanding your competitive position in agent recommendations is critical. Unlike SEO where you can see rankings in real time, agent visibility requires systematic monitoring and tracking over time.

Chapter 5Monthly Optimization Playbook

Agent visibility isn't a one-time project. It requires ongoing optimization as AI models update, competitors adjust, and customer query patterns evolve. Here's the monthly cadence we recommend:

The brands that treat agent visibility as an ongoing channel, with dedicated budget, measurement, and optimization, will capture disproportionate value as AI-assisted shopping grows.