AI Visibility: Buyers Are Shortlisting Without You
AI visibility in B2B commerce: 48% of healthcare suppliers are missing from AI answers. How to measure your presence and build a GEO backlog in five steps.
A procurement team asks ChatGPT for medical practice supply vendors. The answer lists five companies. Yours isn't one of them. Your commerce platform can be fast, clean and well organized: at that moment, none of it matters.
That's the reality for nearly half of the companies in the B2B healthcare market. In the B2B Commerce Report HEALTH (Issue 01, 2026), 48% of the 64 manufacturers and wholesalers analyzed scored zero on the AI Visibility Score. They didn't show up in answers to typical buyer questions.
That puts AI visibility on the agenda of every commerce leader. If you don't measure it, you don't know whether the shortlist is already being built without you.
What you'll get:
What AI visibility is and how the report measured it
Why technical readiness alone won't get you into the answer
Who in your organization should own it
Five steps to a measurable GEO backlog
The shortlist starts in a chat window
Fewer and fewer B2B purchases start with a page of search results. According to Forrester's Buyers' Journey Survey 2025, 94% of B2B buyers used AI in their buying process, up from 89% the year before (published January 2026).
Research, comparison and pre-selection are moving into AI assistants. The system sums up the options before anyone opens a single supplier website. If you're missing from that answer, you're relying on buyers finding you somewhere else.
The catch: Forrester's figure describes the market. How often your customers use AI, and what they ask, only your own measurement can tell you.
What is AI visibility, and how do you measure it?
AI visibility describes whether a company is named in AI-generated answers to relevant buyer questions. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) covers everything that improves that presence: clear company facts, structured data and content worth citing.
For the B2B Commerce Report HEALTH, creativestyle measured AI visibility together with data consultancy WOXOW. For each market segment, ten standardized buyer questions ran through ChatGPT and Perplexity for seven days. The raw data is archived.
Five criteria were scored, each with 0, 1 or 2 points and no weighting:
AI Visibility Score: Does the company appear in the answers?
Share of Voice: What share of all mentions does it get?
Citations: Is its own domain linked as a source?
Sentiment: What's the tone of the description?
SEO Visibility: How visible is it in organic search?
The AI Visibility Score result: 48% didn't meet the criterion, 36% met it partially, 16% fully.
How to read this figure: It's a documented snapshot for the defined questions, systems and survey period (June 1 to September 4, 2026). It shows who's missing. It doesn't show why.
Machine-readable doesn't mean mentioned
The report checks two things separately. Agentic Readiness asks whether machines can use your platform: crawler access, structured product data, policies for AI agents, an llms.txt file. This was assessed with Shopware's Agentic Readiness Scanner.
AI visibility asks a different question: Are you named when someone asks a relevant question?
The two are linked, but one doesn't guarantee the other. A platform can be technically well prepared and still be missing, for instance because the models know little about the company, or the wrong things. Put simply: technology gets you through the door. Whether an answer engine recommends you depends on the facts it finds about you.
Many answer engines rely on retrieval: they pull relevant pages and ground their answers in them. That makes clear, reliable sources about your company far more than a nice-to-have. They're the raw material every answer is built from.
So who actually owns this?
In many companies, AI visibility falls through the cracks. Marketing sees an SEO topic, IT sees a data topic, and sales only notices that fewer inquiries come in.
Our recommendation: one person owns measurement, the commerce team owns execution. Here's how the roles split:
Sales brings real questions from supplier selection.
Marketing reviews company descriptions and external sources.
Commerce decides where helpful answers belong, in the catalog or in content.
Development steps in when access, rendering or data delivery get in the way.
A typical mistake in practice: teams jump straight from observation to solution. "We weren't mentioned" is an observation. "We lack structured data" is a hypothesis. Mix them up, and you end up planning a replatforming when a corrected company description would have done the job.
The report shows this too. In the practice supplies segment, one supplier is named first while a comparable one doesn't appear at all. A single test can't tell you what makes the difference. For that, you need your own baseline.
Five steps to a GEO backlog
Build a baseline from real buyer questions. Collect questions from sales conversations and tenders. Separate brand questions from category questions. For each test, log the prompt, system, date, mentions and cited sources.
Check the answers against your positioning. Does the AI describe your products, applications and role as a supplier correctly? A common pattern: a specialist shows up as a generalist distributor. Fix factual errors first.
Clean up Wikidata. Company name, official website and relevant relationships need to be correct and sourced. It's one of the quick wins WOXOW recommends in the report.
Publish an Entity Grounding Page. A single page that pulls together all key company facts: capabilities, brands, certifications, evidence. Give it an owner, or it will go stale.
Retest and keep the results apart. After every change, rerun the same questions. Track mentions and citations separately from qualified leads and conversions. More visibility is one outcome, revenue is another.
Conclusion: Measure AI visibility before you invest
Nearly half of the healthcare suppliers in the report are missing from AI answers to typical buyer questions. AI visibility is measurable, and it's unevenly distributed.
For decision-makers, the order is clear: measure, diagnose, then invest. Stick to it, and you get a backlog of verifiable tasks instead of a scramble of one-off projects.
The next issue of the report will show how the numbers move. Until then, your own baseline is worth building. One measurement shows where you stand. Repeating it shows where you're heading.
FAQ
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility describes whether a company is named in AI-generated answers to relevant buyer questions, for example in ChatGPT or Perplexity. It's a discoverability metric. On its own, it says nothing about leads or revenue.
How do you measure AI visibility?
Define real buyer questions, run them across several AI systems over a fixed period, and log mentions, citations and sentiment. The B2B Commerce Report HEALTH uses ten questions per segment over seven days.
What's the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO targets rankings in search results. Generative Engine Optimization aims to get you named in AI answers and cited as a source. Both benefit from clear, accessible and well-sourced content.
What is an Entity Grounding Page?
An Entity Grounding Page brings a company's key facts together on one structured page: services, brands, capabilities and evidence. It gives AI systems a reliable source and needs a dedicated owner to stay current.
Sources
Forrester: Buyers' Journey Survey 2025, published January 2026