Get Started
Powered by getmd.ai
AI Visibility Report

Headline Findings Across 18 Industries

Five patterns emerge when you look across the whole index. Each one is a strategic signal for any brand that cares about being recommended by AI.

1. Two kinds of market: decided and undecided

Some categories already have a clear AI "default answer" - a brand the assistants reach for first, by a wide margin:

  • Payments - Payfast (Quality Score 66.3, a 34-point lead)
  • Car brands - Toyota (59.6, a 26-point lead)
  • Business & commercial insurance - Santam (43.9, a 25-point lead)
  • Corporate banking - Standard Bank (53.8, a 24-point lead)
  • SME banking - FNB (53.5, a 24-point lead)

Others are genuinely undecided. The leader is barely ahead of the chasing pack, which means no brand owns the category in the AI's mind yet:

  • Private tertiary education - Varsity College edges Eduvos by 0.7 points
  • Short-term insurance - Santam edges OUTsurance by 1.6
  • Investment & asset management - Allan Gray edges EasyEquities by 2.4
  • Life insurance - Discovery Life edges Sanlam by 4.5

The takeaway for marketers: in a "decided" category, the near-term goal is to win the second look, not to unseat the leader overnight. In an "undecided" category, the #1 position in AI search is there for the taking with a deliberate push.

2. Awareness is not endorsement - the household-name tax

The most consistent finding in the index is a gap between how often a brand is mentioned and how often it is actually recommended. Across industries, many of the biggest, most established brands are named almost everywhere but recommended in only a fraction of those mentions.

Brands flagged as "widely mentioned yet under-recommended" span the economy: Sanlam, Old Mutual, Nedbank, Standard Bank, Absa, Vodacom, Telkom, Volkswagen, Suzuki, RE/MAX, Seeff, Vumatel, Hollywoodbets, and more.

These brands have already paid for awareness. The AI knows them. It just does not champion them - often deferring to a more focused challenger when it comes to the actual recommendation. That gap between being known and being chosen is the single most addressable opportunity in the dataset.

3. Challengers are punching above their weight

In category after category, newer or more focused brands out-rank far larger incumbents on AI recommendation:

  • TymeBank is the #2 most visible SME bank, ahead of every traditional big bank
  • EasyEquities is the #2 investment brand, ahead of giants many times its size
  • Easybet is the #3 betting brand, beating bigger books on recommendation rate
  • Naked out-performs several established insurers in short-term cover
  • Chinese car brands (Chery, GWM, Haval) are firmly in the conversation
  • In IT services, specialist managed-service providers like Turrito Networks and Westech out-rank legacy enterprise integrators

AI assistants reward clarity of positioning. A brand that is unambiguously "the easy one", "the cheap one" or "the one for X" tends to get recommended for that job, regardless of size.

4. The invisible-giant risk

The flip side: several brands that matter in the real world are almost absent from AI answers. Examples include well-regarded names that scored near zero in their category - a sign that their content and authority signals are not reaching the assistants. For any such brand, this is a quiet but serious commercial risk: invisible in AI means absent from the shortlist.

In one case the gap was so large it reshaped the study itself: in IT managed services, the assistants recommended SMME-focused providers that were not even on our initial watchlist far more often than the enterprise integrators that were. The AI's view of "best" did not match the industry's view of "biggest".

5. Whose content the AI actually reads

Across the index we logged 21,433 source citations - the specific web pages the assistants drew on to build their answers. This is the mechanism behind everything above: AI visibility is earned through the content and third-party sources the models trust. The brands that win are, repeatedly, the ones whose own pages and whose mentions on trusted local publishers the assistants are reading.

That is the lever. AI visibility is not a black box - it is a function of what the models can find, read, and trust about you. This index measures where every brand stands today; the citation data points to how they can improve.

Prepared by MO Agency. Powered by Getmd.ai.