They asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews who to buy from. AI named your competitors. The deal never reached your CRM, so nobody on your team knows it was lost.
Maria Dykstra diagnoses why B2B companies are invisible to AI systems, and whether the content, SEO and GEO you are paying for is changing the answer.
Source: The Algorithmic Authority Index, Waves 1–2, 2026
When AI leaves you off the shortlist, the deal never reaches your pipeline, and no report you run will ever show it. Four numbers from your CRM and eight questions put a price on it.
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I run buyer shortlist questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, then publish who gets named. Wave 1 scored 20 companies across 420 assessments. Wave 2 measured four industries.
Two 2026 waves across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Samples, methods and company-level findings are published in the Index.
“Publish more content and AI will find you.”
Category leaders with deep content libraries still received zero citations. Volume without structure lowers visibility. That is the Volume Paradox.
Read: The SEO playbook that killed AI citations →“The rebrand resets how AI sees us.”
81% of rebrand queries still return the old name. AI trusts the identity with more proof, and your old one has years more. That is a Zombie Rebrand.
Read: AI visibility after a rebrand →“We rank on Google, so AI sees us.”
Search rank and AI citation run on separate systems now. Companies rank page one and never appear in the answer. That is Citation Invisibility.
Read: Google rankings are not AI citations →
I built global ad systems at Microsoft that ran over a billion ads a month. I ran Facebook integrations before the platform was public. I sat on the IAB attribution workgroup before the industry agreed what to measure. Every new ranking system repeats the same failures. AI is the fastest one yet.
Find the question you're asking. The layer is where it breaks. The right column is the fix. Layers are sequenced, so the most upstream break gets fixed first.
The Snapshot credits in full toward the Audit within 30 days. Building visibility for a founder rather than a company? The Founder Visibility Engine is the personal-entity track.
Why AI Leaves You Off the List, and What Actually Matters
Your buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google who to consider. A list appears before they ever see you. The book shows the seven places that decision breaks, drawn from more than fifty B2B companies I've examined.
Multiply your yearly opportunities by the share of buyers who research with AI, your shortlist miss rate, your win rate and your average deal value. The AI Shortlist Revenue Loss calculator runs it as a range from your own pipeline numbers. A measured test confirms it. Calculate your revenue loss →
One of seven structural layers is breaking. The most common breaks are Identity Fragmentation, where your surfaces describe you differently, and Semantic Drift, where you use several terms for one concept. AI cannot recommend what it cannot classify. Why your company is invisible to AI →
They resolve more cleanly. Their category, expertise and proof point to one consistent entity, so AI can classify them in a single pass. Expertise alone does not earn the slot. Structure does. Competitors show up in ChatGPT. You don't. →
Often it is not, and most teams cannot tell. Publishing more unstructured content lowers AI visibility, the Volume Paradox. The only way to know is a baseline across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, measured before and after the work. The SEO playbook that killed AI citations →
No. Search rank and AI citation now run on separate systems. The Algorithmic Authority Index found 73% to 86% of tested B2B vendors received zero AI citations. Google rankings are not AI citations →
No. In the Algorithmic Authority Index, 81% of rebrand queries still returned the old brand name. AI trusts the identity with more proof behind it, and the old one has years more. Live retrieval updates in weeks. Model memory takes 6 to 18 months. AI visibility after a rebrand →
Identity and terminology fixes can show results in about 30 days. Trust signals at Layer 6 take 3 to 6 months. Changes that reach model memory take 6 to 18 months. The layer breaking first sets the timeline. The Algorithmic Authority Stack →
SEO earns ranked discovery. AEO makes answers easy to extract. GEO improves selection and citation inside generated answers. AI visibility is the outcome all three feed: whether you make the buyer's shortlist. SEO vs AEO vs GEO →
The Algorithmic Authority Index is original research measuring which B2B companies ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name when buyers ask for recommendations. Wave 1 scored 20 companies across 420 assessments. Wave 2 measured four industries. Read the Index →
Maria Dykstra diagnoses why B2B companies are invisible to AI systems. She is an AI Visibility Architect, creator of the Algorithmic Authority Stack and the Algorithmic Authority Index, and author of The Invisible Audience. What an AI Visibility Architect does →
One brief. The patterns your competitors aren't tracking yet. Covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Published monthly.
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