Most of the conversation around AI visibility has focused on ecommerce. "Best running shoes," "best sustainable skincare": product recommendation queries where AI names a handful of brands and the rest don't exist.
That framing is accurate, but it's incomplete. AI assistants don't just recommend products. They recommend services, tools, agencies, consultants, publications, and content creators. If you have an online presence and people search for what you offer, AI is already forming opinions about you and sharing those opinions with anyone who asks.
AI visibility isn't an ecommerce problem. It's a discovery problem. And it applies to every brand type.
AI recommends services, not just products
Ask ChatGPT "best accounting firms for startups in London" or "top digital marketing agencies for DTC brands." You'll get a list. Three to five names, each with a brief explanation of why they're recommended.
These aren't ads. They're synthesized from the web: review sites, directory listings, case studies, LinkedIn content, industry publications, and client testimonials that appeared in the model's training data or that live search tools can find.
For service businesses (agencies, consultancies, accountants, lawyers, architects) this is a new discovery channel that operates completely differently from referrals and Google search. A potential client who would have asked their network or searched Google now asks an AI assistant instead. The AI responds with a curated shortlist, and the client starts their research from there.
The same dynamics that determine product AI visibility apply to services: review presence, third-party coverage, entity recognition, and structured web data. But service businesses have one additional factor that matters significantly: individual expertise visibility. AI models associate expertise with people, not just companies. A consulting firm whose partners publish thought leadership, speak at conferences, and are quoted in industry media has a fundamentally different AI presence than one that relies purely on its website.
Content creators and publishers face a citation question
For publishers, bloggers, and content creators, AI visibility takes a different form. The question isn't "does AI recommend me?" but "does AI cite me?"
Perplexity and Google AI Overviews search the live web and provide citations. When someone asks a question in your area of expertise, does the AI cite your content or a competitor's? The answer depends on the same factors that drive traditional search visibility (domain authority, content quality, topical focus) but the mechanism is different. AI doesn't rank ten results. It picks the best sources, synthesizes them, and names the ones it found most useful.
For training-data models like ChatGPT and Claude, the question is whether the model recognizes your publication or personal brand as an authority. When someone asks "who are the best writers on [topic]?" or "what does [your publication] think about [issue]?", the response reveals whether your brand exists as a recognized entity in the AI's knowledge base.
Content creators who have built authority in a specific niche through consistent output, cross-platform presence, and recognition from other authorities tend to have stronger AI visibility than those with larger audiences but less focused expertise.
B2B SaaS lives in "best tools for X" queries
"Best CRM for small business." "Project management tools for remote teams." "Invoice software for freelancers." These queries drive a significant share of B2B SaaS discovery, and they've migrated to AI at the same rate as consumer product queries.
AI's recommendations for software tools draw heavily from review platforms (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius), comparison content, and the broader web presence of each product. A SaaS company with strong review platform presence and active comparison content will appear in AI recommendations. One that relies solely on its own marketing site and paid ads will not.
The training data lag is particularly relevant for SaaS. Products evolve quickly, but AI knowledge models update infrequently. A product that was limited six months ago may have shipped major features since, but ChatGPT still describes the old version. Live search tools like Perplexity reflect the current state, while training-data models can be months behind.
The common thread: AI as a universal discovery layer
What connects all of these verticals is a single structural shift. AI is becoming a discovery layer for everything, not just shopping.
In every category (products, services, tools, content, expertise) a growing number of people start their research by asking an AI assistant. The AI provides a curated answer, and that answer shapes the shortlist. Everything downstream (website visits, demos, inquiries, purchases) flows from whether you were in that initial AI response.
This is different from SEO in a fundamental way. Google ranks pages. AI recommends brands.
When Google returns search results, it's ranking individual URLs. A brand can have one page that ranks well and nine that don't. In AI, the unit of recommendation is the brand itself. AI doesn't say "this page from Brand X is the third result." It says "Brand X is one of the best options because..." The brand is either recommended or it isn't. There's no page two.
This makes AI visibility a brand-level metric, not a page-level metric. It's the sum of everything the internet says about you (reviews, editorial coverage, comparison content, social presence, structured data, entity recognition) synthesized into a single question: when someone asks AI about your category, are you in the answer?
Every brand has an AI visibility profile
Whether you're aware of it or not, every brand with an online presence has an AI visibility profile. It's defined by:
Discovery visibility: whether AI mentions you when someone searches for your category. "Best [what you do] for [who you serve]" queries.
Comparison visibility: how AI positions you against specific alternatives. "[Your brand] vs [competitor]" queries and "which is better" prompts.
Trust visibility: what AI says about your reputation. "Is [your brand] worth it?" and "What do people think of [your brand]?" queries.
These three dimensions apply universally. An accounting firm, a SaaS product, a publisher, and a DTC skincare brand all have Discovery, Comparison, and Trust profiles in AI. The sources that feed each dimension differ by vertical (G2 reviews matter more for SaaS, editorial citations matter more for publishers) but the structure is the same.
What's different across verticals
While the framework is universal, the specific levers vary:
Ecommerce brands benefit most from review volume on consumer platforms (Trustpilot, Google Reviews), editorial coverage in buying guides, and product schema markup.
SaaS products benefit most from B2B review platforms (G2, Capterra), comparison content, and founder/leadership visibility in industry conversations.
Service businesses benefit most from client testimonials, case studies, individual expertise visibility (thought leadership, speaking, media quotes), and directory presence.
Publishers and content creators benefit most from topical authority, consistent output in a defined niche, entity recognition (Wikipedia, Knowledge Panel), and cross-platform citation by other authorities.
The inputs differ, but the output is the same: a brand that AI recognizes, recommends, and describes positively when relevant queries arise.
The window is now
AI visibility as a discipline is new. Most brands, across all verticals, haven't measured it, don't understand it, and aren't actively working to improve it. That creates an opportunity for brands that move early.
In every category, there are brands that dominate AI responses and brands that don't appear at all. The gap between them isn't always about size or marketing budget. It's often about whether the right signals exist in the right places: reviews on the platforms AI cites, comparison content AI can synthesize, entity recognition that makes your brand distinguishable.
These are addressable gaps. A focused strategy, informed by actual measurement of what AI currently says about you, can close them in weeks, not years.
SeenByAI works with any brand: ecommerce, SaaS, publishers, services, agencies. It measures your AI visibility across every major platform, shows you exactly where competitors are ahead, and generates a prioritized action plan with specific steps, effort ratings, and timing estimates. Get started free.
Written by Stu Miller, Founder of SeenByAI and CEO & Co-founder of Smart Insights. Stu has spent 16 years helping ecommerce businesses grow their digital marketing, and built SeenByAI after experiencing the AI visibility problem first-hand running his own Shopify store.
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