Your buyers are asking AI who to trust in your category. Do you know what it's telling them?
AI search has changed how B2B buyers find and vet vendors — quietly, without any alert firing in your analytics. AIWorthy measures where mid-market Triangle companies stand, publishes the findings independently, and helps the ones who want to move build from there.
Industry patterns. Platform trends. No company names.
No alert fires when this happens.
No dashboard turns red. Your analytics look normal. But when a VP of Operations at a $40M manufacturing company asks ChatGPT which firms in the Triangle are worth talking to, she gets three names back with quiet, authoritative confidence. If your firm isn't one of them, you didn't lose a ranking. You didn't exist.
This is happening across every industry we track. Not to struggling companies — to well-run, established mid-market businesses that have invested in their marketing and believe their digital presence is solid.
The gap between what they think AI knows about them and what AI actually says about them is the most surprising finding in our research.
The reason it's surprising is that it's invisible. Traditional SEO problems show up somewhere — traffic drops, rank changes, crawl errors. AI visibility gaps don't surface until you go looking.
We go looking, systematically, every month.
Most people selling AI visibility services understand the new tools. Very few have managed a real brand under real business pressure — and watched AI make the old workarounds obsolete.
I spent a decade managing organic search for brands with $1B+ in revenue, including 30% year-over-year organic growth at a $15B company. At the same time, I was working as a senior brand director inside organizations making real brand-versus-business tradeoffs — the kind where the business wins and SEO builds the workaround to protect brand equity on the back end. I had a front-row seat at those decisions for years.
AI search is less forgiving. It often makes those workarounds useless.
I also spent 15 years as a technology journalist, which means I understand how editorial systems evaluate sources because I was one of them. And I built third-party citation ecosystems across the US, Brazil, India, and China — the same citation infrastructure that AI systems now use to determine who is authoritative.
Very few people in this space have managed an enterprise brand, run organic programs at scale, worked inside a newsroom, and built international media relations campaigns. Those things turn out to matter most when AI systems are deciding who to cite.
I built AIWorthy because no one was applying that combination systematically to mid-market companies — the ones with real brand equity, real competitors, and a genuine stake in being findable, but without dedicated AI search resources on staff.
Tracked Across Five AI Platforms
Google AI Mode is monitored but not yet scored — it is currently browser-only with no research API. We will add it to scoring when programmatic access is available.
"The question isn't whether AI search matters. It's whether you've built the foundation it's reading."
The Triangle AI Visibility Index
Every month, the Triangle AI Visibility Index tracks 48 named mid-market companies across five industry verticals in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina — running standardized prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews using a consistent, published scoring rubric.
Not enterprise benchmarks. Not startup case studies. Named companies, real buyers, real prompts — scored the same way every month so you can see the trend, not just a snapshot.
Every research decision, every scoring weight, and every platform choice is documented publicly at aiworthy.ai/methodology. The quality of the methodology is the only basis on which independent research earns credibility.
The July 6, 2026 report tracks how the most significant search redesign in 25 years is changing which mid-market companies get recommended, and which disappear.
The companies in our research that are most visible in AI search didn't get there by accident. They got there because the environment rewarded a specific kind of digital foundation — and they built it. Most didn't know that's what they were doing.
The companies that aren't visible yet aren't behind because they made bad decisions. They're behind because the environment moved faster than anyone announced.
You built something real. Your buyers are asking AI who to trust. Let's find out if you're the answer.