Melbourne AI visibility study

What is AI visibility?

AI visibility is how often, and how well, AI tools mention your business when people ask them for a recommendation. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews "who's the best electrician in Moorabbin?", the answer is a short list of names. If your brand is on that list, you are visible. If it isn't, the person asking may never know you exist.

It is brand visibility for a new kind of search, and it has three parts:

• Being mentioned. Does the AI name your business at all for the questions your customers ask?
• Being mentioned reliably. AI responses change from one ask to the next. A business named in one answer out of three is far less visible than one named every time, which is why we asked three times.
• Being described correctly. When the AI does mention you, is what it says about your services, area and reputation right?

What is AI search visibility?

You will also see the term AI search visibility. It means the same thing, with the focus on AI search platforms such as Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search and Perplexity, which look things up on the web before they answer. Those answers often carry a citation: a link to the page the AI used. Being cited is a second kind of visibility, alongside being named in the answer.

Why AI leaves most local businesses out

An AI model doesn't know your brand the way a regular customer does. It puts an answer together from what it can find and what it trusts: your own website, Google Business Profile, review sites, directories, industry associations, news and lists of the best in your field. For most of the trades and building businesses in this study, there was not much for it to find. Common gaps include a website that doesn't say plainly what the business does and where, few mentions on other trusted sites, and competitors who simply appear in more places.

None of this is about how good the business is. It is about how much the AI can read and back up.

AI visibility and traditional SEO

Traditional SEO is about where your pages rank in Google's list of results. AI visibility is about whether your brand is named in the answer itself. The two overlap a lot: AI platforms that search the web lean on content that already ranks and is trusted, so a business with sound SEO starts ahead. But a page can rank and the brand still be left out of the answer, because the large language model (LLM) behind it is weighing what many sources say about you. Work aimed at AI answers is sometimes called AEO or GEO (generative engine optimisation). It builds on SEO rather than replacing it.

How to improve your AI visibility

Improving AI visibility is SEO and AEO work (answer engine optimisation). The steps that matter most:

1. Say clearly what you do, where and for whom. Put it in plain words on your home page and each service page, so an AI can quote it without guessing. Clear content beats clever slogans.
2. Keep your details consistent. Your business name, address, phone, services and service area should match on your website, Google Business Profile and every directory listing.
3. Answer the questions customers ask. Pages that cover real questions about price, timing, process and service area give AI something specific to use in its answer.
4. Add structured data. Schema markup for your business, services, reviews and FAQs states the facts in a form machines can read.
5. Let the crawlers in. Check that your site does not block the crawlers AI platforms use, and that your key pages load quickly.
6. Earn mentions from trusted sources. Reviews, industry associations, local business networks, supplier and partner pages, and publications in your field. This is usually the slowest step and the one that makes the most difference.

Measuring your enquiries starts with Analytics, Tag Manager and call tracking, so you can see whether better visibility brings in work.

How long does it take to improve AI visibility?

Expect months rather than weeks. Fixes to your own website can be picked up as soon as search engines and AI platforms crawl the pages again, and the AI tools that search the web before they answer can reflect them sooner than those that rely on what the model learned in training. Mentions on other trusted sites take longer to earn and longer to show up, and they are often what moves a business from named sometimes to named reliably. Because answers vary, judge progress over several checks.

How AI visibility is measured

There is no official AI visibility score, and no AI platform publishes how often it recommends a business. What can be measured is what the AI says when you ask it:

• Research the prompts. Write the questions real customers would ask, such as "best builders in Bayside" or "who installs ducted heating in Frankston", rather than your brand name, which the AI will usually find. Run them in ChatGPT and Gemini, since each draws on different sources.
• Ask more than once. Ask each prompt several separate times and record how often your business is named. That share of answers is a fairer measure than a single response.
• Record who else is named. The competitors that appear instead show you who the AI trusts for that query, and where they are mentioned that you are not.
• Check citations as well as mentions. On platforms that show sources, note which pages are cited.
• Track it on a schedule. Monitor the same prompts each month, so a change in the results is a real change in your brand visibility and not a different question.

Any AI visibility tool, ours included, is doing a version of this, and a tool is only as good as its prompts. Its results are a sample of answers on the day, and they can't show what the AI tells people in conversations you never see. That is why we report the numbers in this study as what we could see, and why the method below is set out in full.

Check your own AI visibility

Our free check asks the same three questions about your business and loads your website in a real browser to show which tracking loads. Run the free check on your business.

How we did it

Between October and November 2026 we checked 263 businesses from public lists. For each, OpenAI's GPT-4.1 with web search was asked three separate times, through its API, for the best businesses in their service in Melbourne (or, for software, for Australian businesses), and we recorded whether they were named. Each website was opened in a real browser with any cookie banner accepted, and we recorded which tracking loaded. AI answers vary, and tracking set up on a server can't be seen from outside, so these are what we could see. No business is named, and groups under 10 are left out.

Data: download the table, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.

Use our charts

Copy this to put a chart on your site:

<a href="/ai-visibility-melbourne"><img src="https://foresightdigital.com.au/assets/ai-visibility-melbourne/ai-visibility-by-trade.svg" alt="ai visibility by trade, source Foresight Digital" width="640"></a>
<a href="/ai-visibility-melbourne"><img src="https://foresightdigital.com.au/assets/ai-visibility-melbourne/tracking-trades.svg" alt="tracking trades, source Foresight Digital" width="640"></a>
<a href="/ai-visibility-melbourne"><img src="https://foresightdigital.com.au/assets/ai-visibility-melbourne/never-named-by-group.svg" alt="never named by group, source Foresight Digital" width="640"></a>