# The State of AI Visibility in Australia 2026

**Original research by Answerable. Published 30 July 2026, Melbourne, Australia.**

Canonical HTML version: https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/
Raw data: [data.csv](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/data.csv) and [data.json](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/data.json), licensed CC BY 4.0 with attribution to Answerable.

This is a plain-markdown mirror of the report, published so the numbers can be extracted and quoted cleanly. Every figure here appears on the canonical page. Nothing is modelled, projected or annualised.

We scanned 300 of Australia's most search-visible businesses across six industries on 30 July 2026 and counted who ChatGPT and Gemini actually name when a buyer asks.

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## Key findings

Read every percentage with its denominator. Most of the headline figures are counted over the 137 businesses that returned complete records from both engines, not over the full 300.

| Finding | Figure | Counted over |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mean AI visibility score | 38.3 out of 100 (median 36) | all 300 |
| Never named once by either engine | 41% | the 137 with complete two-engine records |
| Recognised when asked directly, yet never named when a buyer asks | 26% | the same 137 |
| Worst industry, never named by either engine | 76% (tradies) | the 21 tradies with complete records |
| Mean on-site AI readiness | 74.9 out of 100 | all 300 websites |
| Correlation between site readiness and mean per-engine visibility | Pearson r = 0.116 | the 137 (n = 137) |
| Block AI crawlers outright in robots.txt | 13% | all 300 |
| No JSON-LD structured data | 24% | all 300 |
| No llms.txt file | 71% | all 300 |
| Gemini scored the same business higher than ChatGPT | 77% of the time, mean gap 25.3 points | the 137 |
| ChatGPT scored the same business higher | 5% of the time | the 137 |
| Never named by ChatGPT | 54% | all 300 |
| Never named by Gemini | 48% | the 137 with a complete Gemini record |
| Mean score, recognisable anchor brands | 52.5 out of 100, against 36.4 for everyone else | the 36 anchor brands |

Household names are among the invisible. 1300SMILES Dentists, Australian Skin Clinics and Turner Freeman Lawyers were not named by Gemini in any of our test questions. That is a statement about our questions on one day, not about those businesses. It is also how little a famous name guarantees on its own.

On llms.txt, be careful with the hype. We measured adoption because it says something about how legible a site is trying to be to machines, and Google has said it does not use the file. Nobody should sell it as a ranking lever.

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## By industry

Fifty businesses per industry. "Mean score" is the average AI visibility score out of 100. "Never named" means zero mentions from both engines across every question asked, counted over the businesses in each industry with complete records from both engines, because blank Gemini rows cannot be counted either way. Crawler blocking is counted over all fifty.

| Industry | Businesses | Complete records | Mean score | Never named by either engine | Blocking AI crawlers | Best performer |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| E-commerce and retail | 50 | 22 | 55 | 9% | 12% | Bondi Sands (89) |
| Dentists | 50 | 29 | 38.5 | 41% | 14% | Pacific Smiles Dental (76) |
| Law firms | 50 | 23 | 37.5 | 30% | 12% | Slater and Gordon Lawyers (85) |
| Cosmetic and skin clinics | 50 | 23 | 35.2 | 43% | 16% | Laser Skin and Vein Clinic (78) |
| Accountants and advisers | 50 | 19 | 34 | 47% | 12% | Etax Accountants (90) |
| Tradies | 50 | 21 | 29.8 | 76% | 12% | Fallon Solutions (71) |
| **All industries** | **300** | **137** | **38.3** | **41%** | **13%** | **Etax Accountants (90)** |

### Site readiness by industry

Mean on-site AI readiness score out of 100, counted over all 50 sites per industry, against a national mean of 74.9.

| Industry | Mean site readiness | Mean AI visibility | No JSON-LD | No llms.txt |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Accountants and advisers | 80.8 | 34 | 14% | 62% |
| E-commerce and retail | 77.2 | 55 | 28% | 44% |
| Dentists | 75.7 | 38.5 | 20% | 70% |
| Law firms | 73 | 37.5 | 28% | 88% |
| Tradies | 71.5 | 29.8 | 28% | 82% |
| Cosmetic and skin clinics | 71.2 | 35.2 | 24% | 80% |

Accountants have the best-prepared websites in the whole study and the second-lowest visibility score. That is the gap this research is about.

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## Industry breakouts

Each industry has its own page with city splits and a leaderboard.

- [Cosmetic and skin clinics](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/clinics/): mean 35.2, 43% of the 23 complete records never named, 16% blocking crawlers (the highest of the six), top score Laser Skin and Vein Clinic of Adelaide on 78. Sydney clinics average 44.1, Melbourne clinics 27.3.
- [Dentists](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/dentists/): mean 38.5, 41% of the 29 complete records never named, top score Pacific Smiles Dental of Sydney on 76. Sydney practices average 46.5, Perth 30.2.
- [Tradies](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/tradies/): mean 29.8, 76% of the 21 complete records never named (16 of 21), top score Fallon Solutions of Brisbane on 71.
- [Law firms](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/law-firms/): mean 37.5, 30% of the 23 complete records never named (7 of 23), 88% with no llms.txt (the highest of the six), top score Slater and Gordon Lawyers on 85.
- [Accountants and advisers](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/accountants/): mean 34, 47% of the 19 complete records never named (9 of 19), best site readiness in the study at 80.8, top score Etax Accountants on 90.
- [E-commerce and retail](https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/ecommerce/): mean 55, only 9% of the 22 complete records never named (2 of 22), top score Bondi Sands on 89.

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## Methodology

### The sample

300 businesses, 50 per industry, across accountants, cosmetic and skin clinics, dentists, e-commerce, law firms and tradies. For the local-service niches, businesses were drawn from five mainland capital cities. The sample frame was the top organic search results for buyer-style queries, plus a set of recognisable national anchor brands in each industry.

That frame matters. Search-based sampling skews toward businesses that already rank well in classic search, which strengthens the finding rather than weakening it: the businesses that AI never names are drawn from the visible end of the Australian market, not the invisible end.

### The questions

The ChatGPT signal comes from five shared buyer questions per industry and city cohort, the kind a real customer would ask, such as who to use for a service in a given city. The Gemini signal comes from the same sweep plus one grounded direct question per business. Each question was asked once. There were no repetition runs, so a business one answer short of a mention on the day stays unmentioned in this data.

### Named versus recognised

A business is **named** when an engine volunteers it in answer to a buyer question. It is **recognised** when the engine shows it knows the business exists once asked about it directly, but never volunteers it. The 26% figure, counted over the 137 businesses with complete records from both engines, is that second group: real businesses the models know about and do not recommend.

### The scores

Each business carries several scores in the dataset.

- The **AI visibility score** (out of 100) summarises its whole scan record across both engines, site readiness included.
- The **per-engine visibility scores** (`chatgpt_visibility_score` and `gemini_visibility_score`, out of 100) record how visible the business was to each engine separately. These are the fields behind the correlation and engine-comparison figures.
- The **site readiness score** (out of 100) comes from automated on-site checks: whether AI crawlers are allowed in robots.txt, whether structured data (JSON-LD) is present, whether meta basics pass, and whether an llms.txt file exists.

Across the 137 businesses with complete records from both engines, the correlation between site readiness and the mean of the two per-engine visibility scores, both published in the dataset, is Pearson r = 0.116. Readiness explains almost nothing about who gets recommended. Correlate site readiness against the overall AI visibility score instead and you will get a much larger number, because that score folds site readiness into itself. The per-engine columns are the fields this figure is computed on.

The full scoring formula, including the site readiness point allocation, is published at https://answerable.com.au/technology/ and mirrored at https://answerable.com.au/technology.md.

### The caveats, plainly

- One scan week. These models change their answers, so this is a snapshot, not a trend.
- Five buyer questions per cohort on ChatGPT, plus one grounded direct question per business on Gemini, each asked once. A different phrasing on a different day would produce different individual rows, which is why we publish every row.
- Businesses are named factually. "Was not named in our test questions" describes our questions on one day, not the quality of anyone's work.
- Complete two-engine records exist for 137 of the 300 businesses. The headline never-named and recognised-but-never-named percentages, the industry table's never-named column, the engine comparison and the readiness correlation are all computed on those 137. Blank Gemini fields in the raw data mark the rows without a complete Gemini record.

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## What it means

The most useful thing in this dataset is a gap: websites average 74.9 out of 100 for AI readiness while the businesses behind them average 38.3 for AI visibility, and readiness barely correlates with the per-engine visibility scores (r = 0.116, n = 137).

Read that gap honestly and the conclusion is not complicated. On-page readiness is necessary, and 13% of businesses fail even that bar by blocking AI crawlers outright. But it is nowhere near sufficient. The engines are not choosing businesses because their websites are tidy. They are choosing businesses the rest of the web already talks about: reviews, directories, press, industry lists, other people's pages. The anchor-brand numbers point the same way, and so does the fact that three household names still went unnamed by Gemini. A footprint helps and nothing guarantees.

So fix the site, then earn the mentions.

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## Reproducing our numbers

Take the two engine scores and the site readiness score from any row of the published dataset and run the arithmetic. It reproduces the published overall score. We ran it across every row: 300 of 300 match exactly, with no mismatches.

```js
const v = ['chatgpt', 'gemini']
  .filter(p => r[p + '_questions_asked'] != null && r[p + '_questions_asked'] !== '')
  .map(p => r[p + '_visibility_score']);
Math.round(0.75 * (v.reduce((a, b) => a + b) / v.length) + 0.25 * r.site_readiness_score)
  === r.ai_visibility_score
```

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## Frequently asked

**How many Australian businesses are invisible to AI?**
In our 30 July 2026 scan of 300 search-visible Australian businesses, 137 had complete records from both engines. Of those 137, 41% were never named once by either ChatGPT or Gemini. 26% of those 137 were recognised by the engines when asked about directly yet still never named when a buyer question was asked.

**Does a good website get you recommended by ChatGPT or Gemini?**
Not by itself. The websites in our sample average 74.9 out of 100 for on-site AI readiness, yet across the 137 businesses with complete records from both engines the correlation between site readiness and the mean of the two per-engine visibility scores is Pearson r = 0.116. A readable site is necessary, but it explains almost none of who actually gets named.

**Which industry is most invisible to AI?**
Tradies. 76% of the trade businesses with complete records from both engines were never named by either engine. E-commerce brands did best, with a mean score of 55 out of 100 and only 9% of their complete records never named.

**Do ChatGPT and Gemini agree on who to recommend?**
No. Across the 137 businesses with complete records from both engines, Gemini's visibility score for the same business was higher than ChatGPT's 77% of the time, with a mean gap of 25.3 points. 54% of all 300 businesses were never named by ChatGPT, and 48% of the 137 with a complete Gemini record were never named by Gemini.

**Can I reuse this data?**
Yes. The full dataset is published as CSV and JSON under a CC BY 4.0 licence. You can re-run our numbers, challenge them, or build on them, with attribution to Answerable (answerable.com.au). We would genuinely like to hear about it if you get a different answer.

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## Cite this

Answerable. *The State of AI Visibility in Australia 2026*. Melbourne, Australia, 30 July 2026. https://answerable.com.au/state-of-ai-visibility-australia-2026/

Dataset licensed CC BY 4.0. Contact: hello@answerable.com.au