NeuroRank's audit of 122 brands across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity finds High inclusion stands at just 20.0 percent on shortlist prompts, while brand-named questions show far stronger visibility, exposing a measurement gap for marketers.
NeuroRank has published NeuroRank The AI Visibility Index 2026, an audit of how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity represented 122 brands across nine sectors. The central finding is a measurement problem. A brand can look strong when its name is supplied in the question, but do much worse when an assistant must choose brands from a category. The gap is most visible in prompts that ask for a shortlist.
Shortlist and recommendation requests made up 38.6 percent of the study's 7,580 unique prompts. Only 5.9 percent of them named the audited brand, and High inclusion on their individual-model ratings was 20.0 percent. Comparison prompts, by contrast, named the brand 84.8 percent of the time and showed 48.4 percent High inclusion. The study notes that these are distinct prompt classes, not a controlled test of adding a name.
Brand-name checks can also conceal weak discovery. Across individual-model ratings, High inclusion was 56.2 percent on 2,298 brand-named results and 17.8 percent on 4,879 results without the name, a 38.4-point difference. Among 82 brands evaluated in both states, 51 reached at least 50 percent High inclusion when named, but only three did so without the name. Twenty-two reached at least 50 percent when named yet scored below 20 percent when unnamed.
The apparent commercial gap also changes once the name cue is held constant. High inclusion was 27.3 percent on commercial prompts and 35.2 percent on other prompts. Among prompts that named no brand, the figures were 17.4 and 18.8 percent respectively. The raw commercial difference largely reflects how often each class supplies the brand name.
Sector strength can mask the same split
No sector reached 30 percent High inclusion on prompts without a brand name. BFSI led named prompts at 73.4 percent but reached 24.8 percent unnamed, the widest gap at 48.6 points. FMCG and personal care scored 58.5 percent named and 11.9 percent unnamed, while retail and lifestyle scored 59.0 and 13.8 percent.
Ambika Sharma, Founder and Chief Strategist at Pulp Strategy Communications and Product Architect of NeuroRank, said, "AI visibility is being measured too generously by marketers. If a brand looks strong only after its name is supplied, that is recognition, not discovery."
What marketers should measure
The findings support reporting brand-named and brand-not-named prompts separately, and reading shortlist and comparison questions as different tasks. Weak inclusion in sampled shortlist prompts is a potential consideration risk, but the study did not measure sales, pipeline or buyer behaviour.
NeuroRank audited the 122 brands through 7,580 unique prompts from March to May 2026. High inclusion is the report's strongest research classification for a captured output, not a recommendation rate. Named and unnamed prompts were separate pools, so the differences are descriptive rather than matched tests. The full methodology and limits are available in the report and accompanying media notes.
The sectors covered were BFSI; consumer durables and electronics; retail and lifestyle; education; industrial and infrastructure; IT services and software; FMCG and personal care; pharma and healthcare; and professional services.
