AI search 'leaving 90% of British firms out in the cold'

Nearly nine out of ten UK businesses are effectively invisible in AI search results, raising concerns that many brands are losing potential customers despite continuing to invest heavily in traditional SEO.

So says a new study by LLM Listed, which analysed 500 UK business websites across sectors ecommerce, financial services, software, healthcare, professional services and legal services.

Researchers tested whether companies appeared in responses generated by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity when users asked commercially relevant questions within their industry.

The findings suggest that while many companies continue to rank in traditional search engines, they are failing to appear in the AI-generated answers that an increasing number of consumers and business buyers now rely upon.

The report also reveals that only 8% of firms appeared consistently across all major AI platforms, while 76% were outranked by competitors in AI-generated responses. Meanwhile, 91% showed no evidence of an AI visibility strategy and just 15% had content specifically designed to support AI discovery and citation.

The findings come as businesses continue to experience significant changes in how people discover products, services and information online. Recent industry studies suggest AI-powered search experiences are reducing click-through rates to websites, with some analyses showing traffic declines of more than 50% when AI-generated answers appear above traditional search results.

LLM Listed founder Ben Harper said: “Most marketing teams are still measuring success using rankings, traffic and backlinks. The problem is that buyers are increasingly getting answers directly from AI platforms without ever visiting a website.

“The question businesses should be asking is no longer ‘Do we rank on Google?’ The question is ‘Does AI know we exist, trust us, and recommend us?’”

According to Harper, many businesses are facing a new visibility challenge. “Companies have spent the past 20 years optimising for search engines. They now need to optimise for answer engines. We are seeing businesses with strong SEO performance that are virtually absent from AI-generated recommendations.”

The study also identified significant differences between industries. Large brands were substantially more likely to appear in AI-generated answers, while smaller and mid-sized businesses struggled to gain visibility despite often having stronger expertise within niche markets.

The report maintains this trend could create what the authors describe as an “AI visibility monopoly”, where a small number of brands dominate recommendations while competitors become increasingly difficult for buyers to discover.

AI search ‘leaving 90% of British firms out in the cold’

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