What is an AI visibility index?
An AI visibility index is a defined record of what selected AI answers name or cite, rather than a universal ranking of the web. Our September 2026 Absence Index contains 286 checked vendor/category records across fourteen software categories, collected on 22 and 23 September 2026.
What we measured
Measured. The published Index design pairs ten buyer questions in each category with three repeats on five named engines or Search experiences. Its checked vendor set establishes which names were being sought. A company represented in a category record belongs to that defined panel; the 286 records are not a count of every vendor in the market or necessarily 286 distinct legal entities.
Name matching and citation recording describe different outputs. The engine-presence records count checked vendor appearances. Cited-domain records describe sources linked in the answers. Neither unit establishes whether a buyer visited a vendor, qualified for its product or purchased it.
Reasoned. “Absent” has meaning only beside the checked name, retained answers and question set. A vendor not named in one collection was not necessarily excluded from every possible answer. The source records allow the narrower observation to be examined without turning it into a claim about all users or all prompts.
What this means for you
Read the panel first. If your product belongs to a category that was not checked, an absence from this Index is not a measured result for that product. Even within a category, a name needs to belong to the checked set before its zero has the same defined meaning as the other vendor counts.
The construction panel makes the boundary concrete. Its first buyer question concerns a small residential builder; its second concerns a mid-sized general contractor. In ChatGPT, Procore is absent from the first question's three repeats and named in all three for the second. The same checked vendor therefore has different question-level results inside one release.
That category also defines what belongs in the checked set: platforms combining scheduling, budget or job costing, and field documentation for construction buyers. It explicitly excludes pure estimating, generic project management and BIM authoring tools. A missing BIM authoring product cannot be assigned the same measured absence as a checked Procore record; its product class was excluded by the published selection rule.
Also asked as
What does the Absence Index record?
ai visibility index
Related
Next step
For a separate sample concerning your public category, use the Free 10-question check (one engine). No email is needed; runs are limited per network and per day, and by the site's daily allowance.
For one sourced factual error, Fix one answer, $490. Retain the answer and the document that supports the correction.
Every figure comes from the published method, v1.1.
Prepared by the Broadcastwell team.
Page owner: Vikram Patel, AI Architect. Corrections: hello@broadcastwell.com