How Visible Is Your Brand in AI? Now There’s a Way to Know for Certain.

Introducing Highwire’s AI Index: a groundbreaking tool that gives marketing and communications leaders precise, actionable insight into how their brand appears across generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. As large language models increasingly shape search and decision-making, the AI Index cuts through the noise and data to provide clear, executable direction — helping brands understand, benchmark, and strengthen their visibility and reputation in AI-driven environments.

The Shift is Here: Search is synthetic, product and vendor research now starts with al, and most brands aren't ready.

When people have questions, they're no longer just typing them into search engines, they’re turning to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. These platforms are fast becoming the first stop in the decision journey, taking the heavy lifting of a search journey and compressing it into a few simple conversational prompts. No longer can we expect audiences to search, consider and ultimately choose a product, service or even form their own opinions based on original research - they’ll begin where AI leaves off, forever changing the nature of marketing, communications and corporate reputation management.

We all understand this implicitly - after all, with more than 700 million weekly users of ChatGPT alone, you’ve probably used it to shortcut some research of your own. But there’s a problem: While search engine optimization is well understood, AI visibility is a black box. Most brands don’t know how they’re represented in AI-generated responses, let alone how to measure or influence it.

At Highwire, we kept hearing the same questions:

• How visible is my brand in generative AI?
• Why is my competitor showing up more than we are? Or why does it seem that way?
• Are our core messages getting through? How does AI form an opinion?
• Can we influence what these tools say? Can we correct them if they’re wrong?

We looked at a range of tools offering data on AI visibility - from media monitoring tools expanding into prompt monitoring, to SEO tools applying the an ocean of keyword data to test LLM responses to common terms. At every turn, we came up disappointed. It seemed there was no clear or consistent way to answer those questions of brand comparison, reputation and visibility. 

So we built one.

Introducing The highwire aI index

The AI Index is Highwire’s proprietary tool for measuring how brands appear across generative AI platforms. It was built to fill the strategic gap between traditional media monitoring, legacy SEO tools and emerging AI ecosystems. It makes that intelligence available to every Highwire client, no matter their size or sector.

With this tool, communications and marketing leaders can:

• Benchmark their brand’s visibility and narrative pull-through across major AI platforms
• Compare performance against competitors and industry trends
• Surface the sources and citations AI tools rely on
• Track changes over time with daily updates and monthly reports
• See a single score, suitable for executive reporting and goal-setting

It’s lightweight, actionable, and designed to plug directly into your existing reporting workflows. It’s also accessible—we built it to scale across every client need and budget.

Why this matters now

As generative AI reshapes how audiences and decision-makers seek out information, brand discovery is moving upstream. If your brand isn’t showing up in chatbot responses, it’s not part of the conversation. Not understanding how to change that, or how to detect when your reputation might be evolving or slipping, is a dangerous place for modern marketers and communicators. 

It’s especially imperative for:

• Communications teams seeking to measure the impact of narrative and messaging work
• Companies preparing for IPO or funding events
• Brands entering new markets or launching products
• Leaders focused on protecting corporate reputation in a fast-shifting AI landscape

Unlike SEO tools that track keyword rankings, the AI Index captures how your brand is positioned by the most influential algorithms in the world, right now and in direct comparison to your competitors.

What makes this different

We looked at every available solution. Most were built for SEO teams, not marcomms strategists. They prioritized broad spectrum backlinks over context and reputation. Some failed to give credit for visibility or brand mentions which are not linked. Others pushed the burden of prompt design and tracking onto the user, rather than establish a transparent methodology.

Worst of all, we frequently found third party tools counting false positives, or false negatives, which warped scores, made comparisons challenging, and made it impossible to extract true brand perception and reputation from advertising or sponsorship messaging.  

So we took a different approach.

The AI Index was built with three core principles:

1. Clarity: It provides a single score and clear outputs that invite discussion, not dashboards that require decoding.
2. Relevance: It’s model-agnostic, designed to work across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude giving a representative sample of foundation models’ view of the world.
3. Accessibility: It’s the most scalable proprietary solution Highwire has ever built. It can be used across verticals and account tiers.

How It Works

Under the hood, the tool is powered by market research best practices and scalable cloud infrastructure. It uses foundation model APIs to remove historical bias which creeps into regular user accounts, and bases all scoring on repeated samples to eliminate hallucination. From a client perspective, it’s designed to be fast, simple, consistent and reliable.

Here’s how it delivers insight:

• We run daily prompts through major AI tools (both branded and unbranded) to simulate how your audiences might ask about your brand, competitors, or key topics at every stage of the funnel, and across newsworthy categories by industry.
• Each AI model is queried multiple times to reduce outlier results and ensure consistency.
• Prompts are crafted using both standard formats and client-specific inputs.
• Data is processed using a transparent methodology to weight brand mentions and citations  prominence, frequency, funnel stage and aided or unaided brand awareness.

The result? A consistent score with competitive benchmarks, trendlines, and actionable insights, based on a methodology that is familiar and understandable, and data which is reliable.

Plus, all of this is delivered through your existing Highwire reporting dashboards, so there’s no new platform to learn, user accounts or licences to purchase and every insight is designed for distribution to leadership, helping manage expectations and measure results.

What you'll gain

Sure, a score is helpful in understanding your ranking in the marketplace. But this is mostly about using AI visibility to drive smarter strategies. With the AI Index, you’ll gain:

• A clear baseline of how your brand appears in AI-generated content
• Insight into which sources and narratives are influencing AI outputs
• A real-time, data-driven foundation for messaging refinement, content development, and media strategy
• Competitive benchmarks to help you position for leadership

And if you want to go deeper, we offer advanced analysis and integrated programs to actively shape your presence across those channels most readily referenced by AI.

What's next

Starting this fall, AI Index scores will be included in every 2026 planning conversation for Highwire clients. Clients will be able to track, compare, and take action on their brand visibility in generative AI. 

For clients seeking greater insight or influence, we offer:

• Competitive and topical analysis
• Strategic consulting tied to content and media programs
• Integrated campaigns to improve visibility across earned, owned, and shared channels
• Alignment with Highwire’s Corporate Reputation framework for long-term influence and trust

Because visibility in AI is anything but static, and the brands that win tomorrow are already optimizing today.

What to see your AI Index score

If you’re a current Highwire client, talk to your team lead.
If you’re not yet a client, let’s talk.

We’ll show you exactly how your brand is showing up across generative AI and how to improve it.

Let’s make sure your brand isn’t just in the feed. It’s in the answer.