The AI performance market is measuring visibility.

However, AI availability is the right thing to measure, and new studies are starting to emerge in this area.

If you’ve spent any time in marketing, you know mental availability and physical availability.

  • Mental availability is whether you come to mind when the category does.
  • Physical availability is whether you are stocked when buyers go looking.

AI is the new digital shelf, and brands are just starting to understand it.

Brand equity is 63% of LLM visibility. A mention does not give the longevity that distribution and top of mind do. So what does AI availability mean?

Like physical availability, on a new shelf — a shelf that will collapse buying and visibility soon (see GPT and ecommerce protocol updates for this).

Are you one of the brands AI recommends when buyers ask in your category? Across the situations they ask in. Reliably enough to count on.

That is a different question than “did we appear this week,” and it needs a different framework to help brands understand their potential.

Mental availability is measured against category entry points — the situations buyers are in when the category comes up. AI availability works the same way.

Start with the right questions. Map the situations buyers are actually in when they turn to AI in your category.

Ask each question many times. AI answers vary. Ask the same question ten times and you’ll get ten slightly different answers.

Pay attention to how you show up. How does the model describe your brand? (It is known for misrepresenting brands and their socioeconomic position.)

Look across the AI tools your buyers use. Weight by where your buyers actually go — if you don’t know this, ask your customers. AI answers are your brand codes inside AI. You might be known for quiet luxury and AI describes you as simple. That is not ideal.

AI recommendations influence buying decisions more than you think. After seeing an AI recommendation, more than a quarter of consumers switched their brand choice.

AI is likely to make big brands bigger. The mechanics that surface legacy brands will concentrate share in AI-heavy categories. Smaller brands will have to work harder — AI does not level the playing field — but I do see examples where large brands are excluded due to a lack of relevance, and where niche categories (restaurants, beauty) reward strong community signals.

We measure AI availability and visibility because you need to understand both.

It took us a while to get this right — the space is changing rapidly and we didn’t want to launch a product that wasn’t clear and consistent. And we’re not building a self-service reporting tool: there are too many reporting tools in the market already, mostly produced by developers rather than marketing experts.