Goppa Research
You appear in 0% of AI answers. Now what?
Every tool in this category will show you a zero and let you assume it is your fault. Before you spend anything on fixing it, it is worth knowing what the zero means, because we measured the shops around you and it mostly does not mean what it looks like.
Zero is the normal starting point
shops appear in none of the buying questions we ran in their own category.
The median appearance rate is zero in every single category we measured. Not low — zero.
So the first thing the zero tells you is that you are in the majority. It is not a verdict on your shop, and it is not evidence that something is broken.
It is also not a technical problem
This is the part that saves money. We scored the same 64 shops on technical readiness — structured data, crawler access, discovery files, the whole checklist every product in this category sells first.
The median readiness score of the shops that are never named is 100. For the shops that are named, it is 97. The invisible ones score higher. 32 of the 64 score a perfect 100, and 25 of those 32 appear in zero measured answers.
Do the technical work anyway: it is cheap, it is a prerequisite, and without it nothing else can work. Just do not buy it as the fix, because on our numbers it is not the constraint.
What the assistants read instead
An assistant that names no shop is not answering from nowhere. Across the categories we measured it opened 101 source citations, spread over 29 distinct domains. Sorted by how you get onto them rather than by how often they appear:
| Kind of page | Citations | How you get on it |
|---|---|---|
| A competitor's page | 31 | Someone else wrote it. You can ask to be added |
| Encyclopedia entries | 28 | Needs independent coverage first, so it comes last |
| Directories you can join | 23 | No gatekeeper. You submit, you are in |
| Editorial reviews | 17 | A journalist decides. Pitch with data |
| Community threads | 2 | Real participation only. Dropping links gets you removed |
Read that column on the right rather than the one in the middle. 23 of the 101 citations are pages you can join today without anyone's permission — and they are the ones almost nobody bothers with, because they are not exciting.
The encyclopedia entry is the opposite trap: it is the second most cited kind of page, and it needs independent coverage to exist first. Anyone selling you one is selling you a deletion.
What we would do, in order
- Check you are in the index behind the assistant. A page outside it cannot be opened, whatever its markup says. This is the step most tools skip, because it is not a file you can generate.
- Do the technical layer. Cheap, necessary, not the constraint. Half a day, not a project.
- Join the pages that take no permission. Start here, because it is the only step with no gatekeeper between you and the result.
- Ask to be added to the roundups that already get cited. Someone wrote a comparison in your category and the assistant reads it. Email them.
- Measure the answer, not the score. The score is what you control. The answer is what you are being paid for, and they move independently — which is the whole point of the numbers above.
Why an empty category is good news
If most of your competitors were being recommended and you were not, you would be behind, and catching up is expensive. That is not the situation.
The situation is that assistants answer buying questions in these categories mostly without naming shops at all, and the first shops that become nameable take a position nobody is currently defending.
The limits of what we just told you
64 shops across 8 categories is not a census, and the shops were selected for scoring high on technical readiness — which is what makes the readiness finding meaningful and the appearance rate unrepresentative of the web as a whole. Assistants vary by day and by phrasing, and a shop we record as never named may well be named on a question we did not ask. The source counts are citations, not pages read, and a single measurement of any of this is a reading rather than a verdict.
How to cite: Goppa Research (2026). You appear in 0% of AI answers. Now what? https://trygoppa.com/answers/you-appear-in-zero-percent-of-ai-answers — CC BY 4.0.
No shop is named. We publish the counts, the categories and the method; the identity of individual shops stays out of it.