Lurking, ghosted or flying high? What our Halloween poll says about AI visibility

With Halloween just around the corner, it felt like the perfect time to ask our LinkedIn community a slightly scary question.

"If you asked ChatGPT to recommend a supplier in your sector, would your brand come up?"

More and more B2B buyers are now starting their search in AI tools, not just on traditional search engines, yet many brands have never actually checked what those tools say about them. We wanted to find out how confident people feel about their own visibility.

The results

Half of those who voted think their brand is lurking somewhere in AI answers, while not a single person said they’re flying high.

👀 Lurking in there somewhere - 50%

👻 Probably ghosted - 36%

🫣 Too scared to check - 14%

🦇 Flying high in every answer - 0%

(You can see the original poll on our LinkedIn page).

Why nobody’s flying high

It’s completely understandable that no one picked the top answer, because showing up in every AI answer, every single time, is a high bar, and most businesses are still getting to grips with how these tools actually work.

Search engines rank pages, but AI tools work differently. They cite the sources they trust enough to repeat, and buyers are increasingly being handed an answer before they’ve visited anyone’s website, which is a big shift in how brands get found.

Lurking in there somewhere

The most popular answer is actually a good sign, as it shows that half of respondents are confident their brand appears in AI answers at least some of the time.

The real question is what sits behind that confidence. Do you know which AI tools mention you, which questions bring you up, and why you’re being included? And would you know if that changed? Without that visibility, it’s difficult to tell what’s working well, or where you might be missing out on buyers who are already looking.

Getting a clear view of your visibility is what turns ‘somewhere’ into something you can act on.

Ghosted, or too scared to check

More than a third of respondents suspect their brand isn’t showing up at all, which is a real concern if it’s true, because a buyer who never sees your name in an AI answer may never get as far as visiting your website.

And 14% admitted they were too scared to look. We completely get it, but not knowing is far scarier than finding out, and checking is the easy part. Once you know where the gaps are, you can start working out how to close them.

Four tricks to treat your visibility

• Ask the question yourself

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and ask for a supplier in your sector the way a buyer would, without using your brand name. Take note of who comes up, who doesn’t, and which sources the answers seem to lean on.

• Look beyond your own website

AI tools lean heavily on what others say about you, so credible third-party validation counts for a lot, including coverage in the publications your buyers read. Muck Rack’s ‘What is AI Reading?' report found that around 84% of the links AI models cite come from earned media, compared with under 14% from owned media.

• Make your expertise easy to find

Strong SEO is still the foundation that everything else is built on, and clear, specific answers to your buyers’ real questions give both Google and AI tools something worth citing.

• Keep a watchful eye

You can now track how often AI tools mention and cite your brand, so you always know where you stand and can see when that changes.

Find out where you stand

The good news is that not showing up in AI answers isn’t a curse, and it’s something you can fix.

If you’re lurking, ghosted or still too scared to check, the quickest way to find out is to run our free AI visibility scan.

Simply enter your website, and the scan runs five buyer-style prompts across four AI engines - ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews - to show whether your brand is being recommended, cited or left out. It takes around two minutes, and there’s no card or email needed.

Or, if you’d rather talk it through, book a 30-minute call with our founder, Danny. You’re welcome to run the scan first and bring the report along, so you can look at the results together.