AI visibility is not a ranking problem: what I shared at PitchXPO Launchpad 2026

PitchXPO Launchpad 2026 (Day 7) was Founders’ Day. The AlwayzON channel broadcast it live on 26 April 2026, and the recording runs for about three and a half hours. The programme described on the broadcast included AMAs with investors, go-to-market experts and innovation experts, a founder mindset session and a mastermind where founders work through real startup challenges.

I joined on Zoom with the other participants shown in the picture above, as labelled on screen: Larry, Ranjit Rajan and Satish from Simsy AI. Their views are theirs. This page covers only what I shared.

I think marketers are making a category error with AI search. We are treating it like SEO with a different results page. But there may be no results page.

When someone asks an AI assistant for the best options for something, dozens of relevant businesses can be compressed into a handful of names. That changes what visibility means.

In traditional search the page was the unit of competition. You could rank third, eighth or twentieth and still be discovered. In AI answers the entity increasingly becomes the unit of competition. The system is effectively asking one question: do I have enough evidence to confidently include this company?

That is why my work moved from optimizing pages to optimizing entities, a point JC Chouinard and Xpert.Digital both used as a reference in their coverage of Google Search Central Live Toronto in April 2026. I explain the mechanics in what entity SEO is.

These are the terms I use for a distinction I found useful. They are not an industry standard.

• Retrievability: can the system find accurate, useful information about your company?
• Selectability: once it has found you, is there enough relevant evidence to choose your company over the alternatives?

A perfectly optimized website can improve retrievability while doing little for selectability, if nearly every meaningful claim about the company comes from the company itself. So GEO is also about making your business easier to verify.

AI systems can encounter reviews, directories, publications, databases, comparison pages, partner websites, community discussions and other independent sources. Your website is only one piece of the evidence. The useful questions are what the public web collectively knows about you, and whether the wider web supports how you position yourself. Do reviews affect whether AI recommends a business? covers one of those sources in detail.

Nick Watt, Head of Content and Editor at The Business of Marketing, commented on the article that if AI judges a brand using evidence from across the wider web, AI visibility stops being purely an SEO problem and also involves brand, PR, reputation and customer experience. I agree. All of them contribute evidence to the same entity.

Pew Research Center tracked the web browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. When Google showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% of visits when no summary appeared. Clicking a link inside the AI summary itself happened in just 1% of visits.

Read that with care: it is one month of U.S. browsing data on Google, not every market. But it is enough for my argument. Visibility may increasingly influence a decision before the website visit ever happens, so a business that only measures visits will miss part of the picture.

These replace the narrower question I hear most often: does ChatGPT mention us? The weekly question table in my methodology is one way to track the answers over time.

• Can AI retrieve accurate information about us?
• Which sources support our positioning?
• Where are competitors associated with topics where we are absent?
• What independent evidence gives an AI system a reason to select us?

Those four questions need data about how AI assistants describe a brand and which sources they rely on. I co-founded and built Prezlo to give brands and professionals that view, and a way to improve it. 200+ agencies and consultants use Prezlo for their GEO work.