brightonSEO · 8 & 9 October 2026
What are the biggest factors influencing AI visibility for retailers?
Adam Preston
SEO Director, Summit
We scored 250 retailers across five industries on eleven signals, then asked the question most brands are too polite to say out loud: does any of the technical work we do actually change whether an AI recommends us?
The short answer is no — not on its own. This deck walks through what the data showed, why well-built sites still go unmentioned, and the one thing on your own site that moves the number.
The presentation
24 slides, including the Weldricks and Barker & Stonehouse case studies.
Download the presentationPDF · 1.1 MB
What’s inside
- Readiness isn't the lever
- Across 250 retailers, the strongest of our nine technical signals correlates with AI visibility at just 0.09. The other eight are weaker still.
- Fame explains more than fitness
- Brand search demand (0.45) and backlink authority (0.49) beat every on-site signal — and authority itself tracks brand demand at 0.74.
- Your own site is the unlock
- Retailers cited as a source by AI score 3.66 on visibility, against 1.16 for those never cited. Getting named in a prompt helps too: 48% of answers use your site when you're named, versus 9% when you're not.
- ChatGPT rewrites the question
- 31% of fan-out searches add “UK”, 20% add a year, 9% add “best”. Pages that match the rewritten query get cited roughly twice as often.
See where your brand ranks
The full index scores retailers across eleven dimensions and publishes the leaderboard.