Capgemini surveyed 12,000 consumers across 12 countries. 58% said they now use AI instead of Google to find what to buy — up from 25% the year before. A separate Bazaarvoice study found 66% of shoppers now use AI for product discovery.
That should concern every SEO manager reading this. Because Google rankings and AI visibility are not the same thing.
I've been tracking this using Mainroot — running brand queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude to measure how often a brand gets recommended when someone asks a buying question. I ran this on 4 well-known brands across different categories. Here's what I found.
Beats by Dre — 0% AI visibility
Query: "best wireless headphones"
Beats never appeared. Not once across any model or any prompt variation. Sony showed up every time. Sennheiser, Bose, Apple. Beats has more brand recognition than most of them combined and a marketing budget that dwarfs the competition.
The model doesn't care.
The reason is documented in years of forum history. On r/headphones, the top response to "why do people hate Beats" describes the original product as sounding like "the inside of a drunk zebra's colon" and explains that even after Apple acquired the brand and meaningfully improved quality, the reputation never recovered. On r/ask, when someone recently asked whether Beats were worth buying, the top responses were simply "No," "Hell no," and "bad battery life and they don't last in terms of durability."
That's the consensus the model absorbed. Not Beats' ad spend. Not their Google rankings. The decade of community sentiment that preceded them.
Their SEO is fine. Their rankings look great. But when 58% of consumers are asking AI what to buy — Beats doesn't exist in that conversation.
The Citations view in Mainroot shows which domains the answers lean on. For this query, a small set of headphone review and editorial sites dominates — often cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude alike. That layer sits next to forum sentiment: both shape what feels true about the category.
Crocs — 0% AI visibility
Query: "best comfortable shoes"
Zero appearances. 54th overall.
Crocs had a massive cultural comeback — luxury collabs, celebrity endorsements, genuine mainstream relevance. None of that matters to the model.
The communities AI learned from aren't fashion communities. They're practical ones. On r/ScienceBasedParenting, discussions about footwear consistently flag Crocs for lacking arch support and having thick inflexible soles. One commenter — a pediatric PT turned podiatrist — wrote that toes need to splay freely and that Crocs work against natural foot movement. The AI associates "comfortable shoes" with orthopedic consensus, not cultural moments. Hoka, Dansko, and Birkenstock dominate those conversations. Crocs don't.
Cultural visibility and AI visibility are two completely different things.
Citations for "comfortable shoes" skew toward running and gear-testing sites rather than fashion-first publishers — the same practical framing as the Reddit threads the model learned from.
ADP — 22% AI visibility, ranked 7th
Query: "best HR software"
ADP processes payroll for 1 in 6 workers in the US. By revenue, they are the clear market leader in HR software.
Gusto showed up in 60% of AI responses. Rippling at 40%. QuickBooks Payroll at 38%. OnPay at 38%. BambooHR at 28%.
ADP appeared in 22% of responses and ranked 7th.
On r/Payroll, a recent thread asking for ADP experiences produced comments like "ADP was a nightmare for us" (14 upvotes), "don't use ADP — implementation was the most rage-inducing process," and a description of their tech as "a hodge-podge of legacy systems band-aided together with the same logo on it." Another user summarized it simply: "tech or service, pick one — ADP tries to be both and fails at both."
For B2B specifically, the 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report found that 94% of B2B buyers now use AI during vendor research — and that 95% of the time, the winning vendor is already on the buyer's shortlist before the first sales call. If AI isn't including your brand in early research, you're not competing for that deal.
ADP didn't lose their AI visibility to a better product. They lost it to a better narrative — one that built up in online communities for years while they dominated traditional sales channels.
Here the cited domains mix vendors (including adp.com), close competitors, and comparison content — so the shortlist in the answer reflects both who gets linked and who the narrative favors.
Monday.com — 54% AI visibility, ranked 7th
Query: "best project management tool"
Monday.com isn't invisible. 54% is not zero. But look at what's ahead of them.
Asana shows up in 98% of responses. ClickUp at 90%. Wrike at 80%. Jira at 70%. Trello at 55%. Smartsheet at 55%.
Monday.com ranks 7th — behind 6 competitors — despite one of the largest marketing budgets in the category.
On r/mondaydotcom — their own community — a recent post titled "I hate Monday.com" describes it as the "worst product I've ever had to work with" with "non-existing" user-friendliness. Even in threads about their AI features, users note the product works for simple use cases but becomes unreliable at scale. One comment: "Monday works fine as a UI tool, but the moment you rely on API or automation, it gets unreliable fast."
The model learned from this. Asana is consistently positioned as the serious professional tool. Monday shows up as an alternative, not a first choice.
In a world where AI shapes the shortlist before a buyer ever visits a website, being 7th is a real problem.
For project management, roundups and category publishers show up repeatedly in Citations — a narrow band of trusted domains that multiple models share.
What's actually happening
This isn't a coincidence across four brands. It's a pattern.
Research from Onely found that authoritative list mentions and forum discussions account for 41% of AI citation decisions. Backlinks — the core of traditional SEO — have minimal impact on AI visibility.
Google rewards authority and backlinks. AI rewards narrative and consensus.
Beats built a brand. The internet built a consensus that contradicted it. ADP built market share. The forums built a reputation that overshadowed it. The model learned from the forums.
If your brand has accumulated negative sentiment in the communities AI learned from, you can spend millions on SEO and still be invisible when someone asks ChatGPT what to buy.
What this means for agencies
These aren't obscure brands. Beats, Crocs, ADP, Monday.com — real marketing budgets, strong Google rankings, broad awareness. None of them show up first when someone asks AI for a recommendation.
The 6sense data makes the stakes clear for B2B: 95% of buying decisions are effectively made before the first vendor conversation. If AI isn't including your client in the research phase that precedes that conversation, no amount of outbound will fully compensate.
If you're running SEO for clients and you've never checked where they stand in AI recommendations, you're missing half the picture. Google rankings tell you one thing. AI visibility tells you something completely different.
We built Mainroot to track exactly this — how often a brand gets recommended across AI models, which prompts trigger or kill visibility, and where competitors are winning instead. Your first audit is free.
Check your score at mainroot.io.
Sources
- Capgemini 2025 Consumer Report — capgemini.com/insights/research-library/what-matters-to-todays-consumer-2025
- Bazaarvoice 2026 Shopper Experience Index — bazaarvoice.com
- 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report — 6sense.com/science-of-b2b/buyer-experience-report-2025
- Onely — How ChatGPT Decides Which Brands to Recommend — onely.com/blog/how-chatgpt-decides-which-brands-to-recommend
- r/Payroll — "What is your experience with ADP?" — reddit.com/r/Payroll
- r/headphones — "Why do people hate Beats so much?" — reddit.com/r/headphones
- r/ask — "Are Beats Headphones Worth the Price?" — reddit.com/r/ask
- r/mondaydotcom — "I hate Monday.com" — reddit.com/r/mondaydotcom
- r/ScienceBasedParenting — "Are Crocs really bad for toddlers?" — reddit.com/r/ScienceBasedParenting