WILMINGTON, DE — Companies with strong traditional search rankings frequently fail to surface in AI-generated software recommendations, according to a Slate study of 4,500 responses from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity that found third-party sources played a larger role than companies’ own websites.
The benchmark examined 50 AI companies using 30 buyer-intent prompts per company across the three services. Slate calculated an AI visibility score based on how frequently each company appeared and its average position when mentioned.
The median company appeared in about 10% of relevant responses and registered a 4.5 score on Slate’s 100-point scale, indicating that even established AI businesses often received limited exposure when users asked the services for software recommendations.
Consumer-oriented products occupied prominent positions in the results. Language-learning service Speak, AI music generator Suno and video platform Synthesia were among the companies that surfaced most strongly, while several prominent AI model developers appeared less frequently, according to Slate.
The study also found little relationship between conventional web authority and visibility in AI-generated answers. Slate measured website authority using Ahrefs Domain Rating and reported that companies performing strongly in traditional search were not necessarily more likely to be recommended by AI services.
That distinction could alter how businesses approach online visibility as consumers increasingly use generative AI systems for product discovery. Traditional search-engine strategies have generally emphasized companies’ control over their own websites, while Slate’s findings suggest outside references may carry greater weight in AI-generated recommendations.
Across roughly 10,000 sources cited in the study, 41 of the 50 companies had no citations directing users to their own websites, according to Slate. YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn were among the third-party sources that appeared frequently.
“Being well known and being recommended by AI have become two different things,” Slate co-founder Shiyam stated. “These systems build their answers from what the wider web says about a company, not from what the company says about itself.”
The findings do not establish that third-party references cause higher AI visibility. The benchmark measured associations between company appearances, rankings and cited sources rather than testing how individual AI systems determine recommendations.
Slate drew the 50 companies from an independent industry ranking rather than selecting the businesses itself, according to the methodology. The company described the study as unsponsored and based on a reproducible published method.
The research also serves as the basis for Slate Index, a continuously updated product that tracks how brands appear in AI-generated recommendations relative to competitors and identifies sources appearing in those responses.
The live index is available at slateindex.ai.
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