We asked an AI answer engine about 101 SaaS brands across 23 categories — the brand itself, its reviews, and its alternatives — and recorded which sources it actually cited. This is the anonymous, aggregate picture of AI search visibility in mid-2026.
Data collected July 2026 · 101 brands · 2,469 structured citations · engine: Perplexity (sonar)
of brands get cited when you ask AI about them by name
get cited when buyers ask AI for alternatives in their category
of brands AI clearly knows still vanish from alternatives answers
of everything AI cites is third-party content, not the brand's own site
Ask AI about a brand by name and it cites that brand's own site 91% of the time. Ask for the brand's reviews and the citation rate drops to 56%. Ask for its alternatives — the question a buyer asks right before choosing — and it drops to 55%. The closer a query gets to purchase intent, the less control a brand has over the answer.
39 of 92 name-recognized brands were not cited on the alternatives query for their own category
We looked only at the brands the AI engine clearly knows — the ones it cites when asked about them by name. When we then asked for alternatives in their category, 42% of those same brands were nowhere in the cited sources.
Being well-known is not enough. AI assembles alternatives answers from third-party comparison content — community threads, listicles, review platforms — and a brand that is absent from those surfaces is absent from the answer, no matter how big its name is. That is a property of the mechanism, not a scoreboard: it hits famous and niche brands alike.
Out of the three queries per brand, 42 of 101 brands were cited on all three — and 5 were cited on none. The average visibility score is 68 out of 100.
Average visibility score — the share of the three queries on which a brand gets cited — ranges from 33 to 93 across categories. Categories with strong community and review footprints sit near full coverage; categories where buying research happens elsewhere lag far behind.
| Category | Brands sampled | Avg visibility score | Cited on alternatives |
|---|---|---|---|
| CRM | 9 | 52 | 56% |
| HR | 9 | 71 | 56% |
| Project management | 9 | 63 | 67% |
| Design | 6 | 56 | 50% |
| Productivity | 6 | 55 | 33% |
| Analytics | 5 | 93 | 80% |
| Finance | 5 | 40 | 20% |
| Knowledge base | 5 | 87 | 80% |
| Monitoring | 5 | 87 | 80% |
| Video | 5 | 33 | 0% |
| Automation | 4 | 42 | 25% |
| Dev platform | 4 | 75 | 50% |
| Forms | 4 | 92 | 75% |
Showing 13 of 23 categories — those with at least 4 brands sampled. Scores are category averages; no per-brand data is published.
Across 2,469 structured citations, the single biggest sources are Reddit (9.1%) and YouTube (8%) — ahead of any review platform. And only 10% of all citations point at brand-owned domains: about 90% of what AI reads about a brand is content the brand does not control.
| Source | Share of all citations | Cited for # of brands |
|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 9.1% | 98 |
| youtube.com | 8% | 89 |
| g2.com | 3.9% | 73 |
| trustpilot.com | 3.7% | 73 |
| en.wikipedia.org | 2.5% | 55 |
Only hosts cited across at least 5 different brands are listed, so no single brand's footprint can be reverse-engineered.
Brand-name visibility is nearly free (91%). The reviews and alternatives queries are where roughly half of brands disappear — and where buyers actually decide.
Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, comparison listicles and review platforms make up most of what AI reads. Around 90% of citations are content you don't own — earn presence there instead of only polishing your own site.
A brand can be fully visible on its name and invisible on alternatives. Track brand, reviews and alternatives queries separately — averages hide exactly the gap that costs you buyers.
Sample: 101 established SaaS brands across 23 categories (project management, CRM, HR, analytics, design, finance and more). SEO/GEO tools were excluded from the seed list to avoid self-interest. Data collected July 2026.
For each brand we asked Perplexity (sonar) three questions a real buyer asks — the brand name, "[brand] reviews", and "[brand] alternatives" — and recorded the engine's structured citations. A brand counts as cited on a query only when its own domain appears among those structured sources; the answer prose is never parsed.
Honesty rules: failed calls are recorded as unknown and excluded from every denominator — never counted as "not cited". Rerun rows are deduplicated keeping the latest attempt. In this run, all 101 brands completed all three queries.
Anonymity: only aggregates are published. Categories appear only with 4+ brands sampled; source hosts only when cited across 5+ different brands. Every number on this page is reproducible from the raw run by the committed aggregation script.
An AI visibility benchmark measures how often AI answer engines cite or recommend brands when users ask about them. This benchmark covers 101 SaaS brands across 23 categories, measured on Perplexity (sonar) in July 2026 with three buyer-style queries per brand: the brand name, its reviews, and its alternatives.
A brand counts as visible on a query when its own domain appears in the engine's structured citations for that query. In this dataset, 91% of brands are cited on their brand-name query, 56% on reviews queries and 55% on alternatives queries. Failed calls are excluded from denominators, never counted as misses.
By design. The purpose is to show how AI recommendation behaves as a mechanism — citation rates, the alternatives gap, category differences and dominant sources — not to score individual companies. Only aggregate, anonymous numbers are published, and source hosts are shown only when they appear across many different brands.
Yes. TriRank's free AI visibility audit runs the same kind of structured-citation check on your own domain: whether AI cites you, which sources it reads instead, and how you compare to competitors. The audit is free.
Run the same structured-citation check on your domain: see whether AI cites you on brand, reviews and alternatives queries, and where it looks instead.