We asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews 473 of the questions Australian buyers type every day. Things like who’s the best builder near me, what does a lawyer cost, and is this brand any good.
Then we sat down and recorded exactly who the machines named, who they linked to, and who never came up at all.
When Australians asked what a service business charges, the businesses themselves appeared in 5% of answers.
The pattern runs through the whole study, and it is a simple one. If you sell a service rather than a product, you are missing from the conversation about what your own work costs.
| Industry | Cost answers naming a register business | Sector |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 5 of 29 | Service |
| Real Estate | 0 of 30 | Service |
| Builders | 2 of 30 | Service |
| Manufacturers | 0 of 30 | Service |
| Lawyers | 1 of 30 | Service |
| Ecommerce | 30 of 30 | Product |
| Supermarkets | 28 of 28 | Product |
| Big Retail | 29 of 30 | Product |
| Banks | 29 of 29 | Product |
| FMCG | 28 of 30 | Product |
| Service industries: 8 of 149. Product industries: 144 of 147. | ||
None of which stopped the engines answering. They simply answered from somewhere else, pulling their prices out of directories, comparison sites, industry bodies and government pages. So when a buyer asks what your kind of work costs, they are getting a number back. It just isn’t coming from you.
We think this is the most valuable unclaimed territory in Australian search at the moment, and the reasoning is fairly plain. Cost questions are the highest-intent questions anybody asks, because nobody types them idly. The engines are already answering them today, whether or not you are in the room. And almost nobody who actually does the work has turned up to that conversation. Whoever gets there first in each category, publishing real pricing in a format the machines can read, is going to own it for quite a while.
| Ecommerce | 94% | 51% | 0 of 30 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supermarkets | 90% | 36% | 0 of 28 |
| Big Retail | 87% | 48% | 1 of 30 |
| Banks | 86% | 51% | 0 of 29 |
| FMCG | 86% | 41% | 2 of 30 |
| Healthcare | 62% | 56% | 24 of 29 |
| Real Estate | 53% | 32% | 30 of 30 |
| Builders | 51% | 31% | 28 of 30 |
| Manufacturers | 49% | 44% | 30 of 30 |
| Lawyers | 42% | 38% | 29 of 30 |
Read that table from top to bottom and the line through it is hard to miss, though it probably isn’t the line you would expect. Size doesn’t explain it. Neither does age, and neither does revenue. What separates the visible from the invisible is simply whether you sell a product or a service. Consumer brands get named in around 89% of their answers, while service businesses manage 51%, and they are almost never there on the questions that actually decide who gets hired.
Across the Index, four in ten mentions arrive with no link back to the business’s own site at all. In those answers the engine is describing a company entirely from what everybody else has written about it: reviews, directory listings, forum threads, old news pieces.
That gap matters rather more than it first appears. If the machines are describing you from third-party sources, then third parties are writing your description for you, and nobody is showing you the draft before it goes out.
Named in 90% of their answers. Cited in 36%. The rest of that conversation belongs to comparison sites and Reddit.
Australian AI Visibility Index v1.0, August 2026
Names the most businesses, declines the biggest questions. It names more businesses than either of the others, but it also walks away from the questions that matter most: half of its 41 non-answers were people asking who's the best. Google would rather show you nothing than pick a winner, and the LLMs, for better or worse, always pick.
A composition engine. It writes rather than retrieves, citing 3.5 sources an answer, and on reputation questions it often answered straight from memory without citing anything at all. Being known to ChatGPT and being sourced by it turn out to be two quite different things, and the first is earned over years rather than campaigns.
A retrieval engine that shows its working. It averages 18.5 citations an answer, which makes it the most winnable of the three. Presence is earned page by page here, so if your site genuinely answers the question, you can be in the answer.
Our capture harness anchors every question to Australia, because the raw APIs default to answering as if the asker were American. Unanchored, the same trademark question returned USPTO and US attorney referrals. Anchored, it returned IP Australia and named an Australian firm. The methodology has the full worked example.
Some of what we found was not absence so much as mistaken identity. Asked “Is Up any good? What do reviews say?”, one engine went away and reviewed the Pixar film. Asked about Rebel, another worked through a camera, a movie and an app before it got anywhere near the sports retailer. And one business in the register, which has a fairly generic name, was never once identified correctly across all fifteen of its answers. An engine decided the name was “an industry term” and recommended other companies instead.
Not once identified. An engine called its name “an industry term” and recommended other companies instead.
Australian AI Visibility Index v1.0, August 2026
This one is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is not a ranking problem. If an engine can’t resolve your name to your business, you are not ranking badly. You are simply not in the answer space at all. Somewhere along the way, having a distinctive name stopped being a branding preference and quietly became a technical requirement.
Here is the short version. We have published the full methodology as well, including the register, both amendments and every judgment rule we applied, and that is deliberate: a study that hides its working is asking you to take its numbers on faith, and these numbers are far too pointed for that.
First-pass scoring is complete across all 1,459 answers.
Independent second-scoring of a 10% sample is in progress. When it completes, verified figures replace these and every change is logged below.
We publish the agreement rate whatever it is.
Nothing in this Index suggests that AI visibility is a ranking you can go out and buy. What it does tell you comes down to three things.
We run search across Google and the AI answer engines. If you want to know where you actually stand in these same three engines before you decide anything, that is what the AI Visibility Report is for.