AI is already recommending your competitor.
When a customer asks AI what to choose, they don't get a list. They get a recommendation.
That recommendation is shaped by how AI perceives your brand. Before your team ever speaks.
A look inside this week's edition
Free. Every Monday. What AI is saying about brands right now.
This Week in AI Perception: Issue #1
6 findings from across the OTA sector. 6 analysts. 4 models.
One OTA brand is being recommended. The others are being listed.
Decision Ranking Index reaches ~75 for the category leader – a 12-point gap to the next brand across all four models. Presence and recommendation are not the same thing. Most brands have one. Only one has the other.
We ran trust queries across every OTA brand. Every model returned uncertainty, not reassurance.
Recovery signal sits at ~20 across the sector. No brand has structured examples of issue resolution for AI to reference. When customers ask AI "can I trust this brand," there is no answer to give.
All five OTA brands appear in AI responses. None of them control what gets said.
Share of Voice stays below ~25 across the sector. Aggregators and third-party review sources fill the answer space. The brands are present. The narrative belongs to someone else.
The same query. Four models. An 18-point gap in how authoritatively brands were cited.
The gap comes down to three structural inputs: knowledge panels, FAQ schema, and indexed content. Brands at the bottom aren't losing on product. They're losing on infrastructure.
Ask four models to describe these brands. You get five different companies.
Narrative scores range from ~78 to ~23 – a 55-point spread within the same category. Stronger brands are described the same way every time. Weaker ones have no stable story across responses.
Live sentiment has moved. AI hasn't noticed yet – and that gap is the risk.
Divergence of ~20–25 points between current sentiment and model outputs across the sector. Models reflect trained understanding, not this week's reality. Brands improving their reputation right now may not see it reflected in AI for months.
Your report shows what AI says about your brand, and what to do about it.
If your brand is ranked third, the decision is already made.
Where BrandTrustHQ fits in this new layer.
AI is becoming the first touchpoint in decision-making. This layer decides what gets considered before your team enters the conversation. Most brands are still optimising for search engines. The brands pulling ahead are measuring how AI perceives them – and acting before competitors even know this layer exists.
AEO and GEO are how you improve. BrandTrustHQ is how you know what to improve. Most brands skip straight to optimisation without measuring what AI actually says about them. That is like running ad campaigns without analytics. Understand the difference →
Decision Ranking Index (DRI)
DRI measures whether AI chooses you. Not just whether it mentions you.
A single 0 to 100 score. Six dimensions. Benchmarked against your competitors. It's the spine of every report we produce.
Leads in 0.7%. That gap is the revenue problem.
Six structured evaluation frameworks. Not chatbots.
Each analyst runs specific query sets across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Their scores roll up into your DRI. Every analysis is reviewed by a human editor before delivery.
The strategist. Orion tracks where your brand appears in AI responses and how often it leads. Obsessed with first position. Believes that being mentioned is participation, but being recommended is power.
The competitor. Sirius runs head to head comparison queries, the highest intent prompts in any buyer journey. Scores whether AI recommends you or your competitor when users force a direct choice. No draws. Someone always wins.
The sceptic. Vega hunts for cracks. Measures how strongly AI conveys credibility, and what damaging narratives it surfaces unchallenged. She's the one who finds the 2021 Glassdoor review that's still shaping how AI talks about your company.
The editor. Altair measures how accurately AI articulates your value proposition. Cares about precision. If AI describes you as "an innovative platform" instead of what you actually do, Altair flags it. Vagueness is a ranking problem.
The empath. Rigel reads the emotional register AI uses when describing you. Is AI enthusiastic about your brand or just acknowledging it? That tone difference determines whether a prospect clicks through or moves on. Rigel catches what data misses.
The engineer. Polaris works under the hood. What data structures, knowledge graphs, and sources underpin AI's narrative about you. Doesn't care about your blog post. Cares about your schema markup. In most reports, the highest ROI fixes come from Polaris.
How AI decides whether your brand gets recommended.
- → Where you lose decisions to competitors
- → Your exact ranking across 4 AI models
- → How AI describes your brand vs competitors
- → What narratives are helping or hurting you
- → A 30 day roadmap to improve recommendation rates
- ✓ Your messaging aligns with how AI evaluates your category
- ✓ You identify and correct negative narratives early
- ✓ You increase how often AI recommends your brand
Before
After
Two ways to start.
- · How real brands are performing across 4 AI models
- · Which campaigns actually moved AI perception
- · Patterns in how AI recommends, ranks, and describes brands
- · Findings from all six AI Analysts: Orion, Sirius, Vega, Altair, Rigel, Polaris
- · Delivered every Monday to your inbox
- · 6 analytical dimensions scored for your brand
- · Testing across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity
- · Full DRI scoring across all six dimensions
- · Verbatim AI responses about your brand
- · 30 day action roadmap
- · Narrative gap analysis vs top 3 competitors
- · PDF report + human editorial review
Most brands only discover this after losing deals to competitors they should have beaten.
When brands come to us
Common questions.
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"Everyone is either terrified of AI or selling AI tools. Nobody is just studying how these models interpret the brands we build every day."
AI is already shaping how brands are chosen. We study how that happens, and what moves it.
SEO took ten years to become a boardroom conversation. AEO and GEO are on a faster clock. We are building the measurement standard before the hype cycle decides it for us.
Know what AI says about your brand. Before your customers do.
AI is already recommending your competitor.
The only question is whether you can see it, and change it.
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