How AI decides which businesses to recommend, and why most Northern Irish ones are missing.
When someone asks ChatGPT for “a good branding agency in Belfast,” a name comes back. It isn’t random, and it usually isn’t the best business. It’s the most legible one. We ran the test on 36 Northern Irish businesses across four AI assistants. They recommended one only 19.2% of the time. This is what we learned about how the shortlist gets built, and how to get on it.
The shortlist you can’t see.
Search used to give you ten blue links and let you choose. An assistant gives you one answer. Somewhere between the question and that answer, a shortlist got drawn, and your business was on it or it wasn’t. You never see the list. You just don’t get the call.
We wanted to know how that list gets built for real businesses here, so we ran the experiment properly.
A real test, run the way customers actually ask.
We took 36 Northern Irish businesses across three sectors, creative and web agencies, accountancy firms, and hotels and restaurants, twelve in each, and put nine questions about each to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Some questions named the business. Most didn’t, because that’s how customers actually ask. We logged whether each business appeared, where it ranked, how it was described, whether the facts were right, and every source the assistant leaned on. That’s 1,296 answers, captured on 15 June 2026.
- Category
- “Best branding agencies in Belfast?”24.7%cold visibility
- Problem-led
- “Who can rebrand my firm?”17.7%cold visibility
- Recommendation
- “Recommend me a good one”11.1%cold visibility
It’s a brand problem, not an SEO one.
Here’s the finding that changes what you do about it. To build those answers, the four assistants cited 2,471 different sources, and they were overwhelmingly third-party. Directories. “Best of” listicles. Review platforms. Forum threads. The businesses’ own websites barely featured. AI doesn’t decide whether to recommend you by reading your homepage. It decides by reading what the rest of the web says about you.
That’s why the old playbook misfires. Meta tags and keywords are about being indexed. Being recommended is about being cited, turning up, described consistently, in the places an assistant already trusts. That’s closer to PR and brand than to technical SEO.
The proof is in who wins.
If recommendation were earned on the open web, the sector with the richest third-party footprint should win. And it does. Hotels and restaurants appeared on cold questions 35.4% of the time. Accountancy firms, 14.6%. Agencies, just 7.5%. Hospitality was nearly five times more visible than agencies.
The difference isn’t talent. It’s footprint. Hospitality lives on TripAdvisor, Expedia, travel editorial and Reddit threads. Third-party, reviewed, everywhere. Agencies mostly point at their own websites, the one source AI trusts least. See the full sector breakdown in the report →
You’re named high, or not at all.
A small comfort and a sharp edge. When a business did appear, it was usually near the top. 82.2% of appearances landed in the top three, and the most common position was first. There’s very little “buried on page two.” AI shortlists are short. You’re named early, or you’re not in the room. There’s no quiet middle to coast in.
There isn’t one AI search to win, there are four.
The four assistants agreed on whether to mention a given business only two-thirds of the time, a 33.3% disagreement rate. Gemini was the most generous, naming a business 25% of the time on cold questions. ChatGPT was the most reserved, at 15.6%. So “are we visible in AI?” has four different answers, and a strategy that wins ChatGPT can be invisible on Gemini. You have to look across all four.
What this means for you.
Three questions are worth asking of your own brand.
- 01
Are we appearing on cold questions?
The ones where nobody types your name.
- 02
Who gets recommended instead?
And what are they embedded in that you’re not?
- 03
Is the machine describing us accurately?
Or filling gaps with guesses?
You can answer the first one in about thirty seconds.
See where you stand.
We built a free check that runs your business the way we ran these 36, across the major assistants, and shows you what they say, and don't. No card, no call. Just the answer.
Check your AI visibility. Free.About the author
Phill Hendry runs Level44, a Belfast brand and web studio building for the answer-engine era. This research was produced in-house using Level44’s own AI visibility platform.
The series
Part of Level44’s AI visibility research set.
A connected set of pages on how AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend. Read in any order.
- The State of AI Visibility for Northern Irish Business 2026
The full data report. 1,296 answers, four assistants, 36 businesses, broken down by sector, assistant and question type.
- Methodology
How the scan was run, what was measured, and the limits stated plainly. Citable.
- AI visibility for accountancy firms in Northern Ireland
The sector at 14.6%. Which sources the assistants leaned on and where the firms that surface live online.
- AI visibility for hotels and restaurants in Northern Ireland
The most-visible sector at 35.4%, but a handful of venues take almost every recommendation.
- AI visibility for agencies and studios in Northern Ireland
The lowest-visibility sector at 7.5%. The structural reasons creative agencies score worst.
- How AI search actually works, an FAQ
Plain answers to the common questions, plus a glossary.
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