Twin Cities AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026
We asked two AI assistants to recommend a local provider in 18 categories across the Twin Cities. Out of 906 real businesses, they named 9. That is 99% of local businesses the assistants could not recall at all.
906
Businesses measured
897
Never recalled
120
Prompts asked
18
Categories
What this number is, and is not
This release measures unprompted recall: the assistants answered from their own knowledge, with web browsing switched off. It tells you whether a business exists in the model's picture of the market at all. It is not a measure of whether a business gets cited when an assistant browses the live web before answering, which is a different and usually more forgiving number. We are deliberately reporting the two separately rather than blending them. The grounded series starts with the next release.
Recall by category
Every row is a separate finding. Percentages are the share of measured businesses in that category that neither assistant named.
| Category | Measured | Not recalled | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto Repair | 176 | 174 | 98.9% |
| Barber Shop | 89 | 89 | 100% |
| Chiropractor | 22 | 22 | 100% |
| Clinic | 14 | 14 | 100% |
| Dentist | 40 | 39 | 97.5% |
| Gym | 14 | 14 | 100% |
| HVAC | 30 | 30 | 100% |
| Hair Salon | 100 | 99 | 99% |
| Law Firm | 16 | 15 | 93.8% |
| Local Retail | 20 | 20 | 100% |
| Med Spa | 17 | 17 | 100% |
| Nail Salon | 163 | 163 | 100% |
| Pet Services | 21 | 21 | 100% |
| Plumbing | 26 | 23 | 88.5% |
| Real Estate | 46 | 46 | 100% |
| Restaurant | 81 | 81 | 100% |
| Roofing | 17 | 16 | 94.1% |
| Other (pooled, small samples) | 14 | 14 | 100% |
What their websites look like
We also crawled the same businesses' own sites. These are the fixable problems that stop a site being read cleanly by anyone, human or machine.
| Category | No website | No valid SSL | Not mobile friendly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto Repair | 29.7% | 6.9% | 6.3% |
| Barber Shop | 28.1% | 8.4% | 1.2% |
| Chiropractor | 9.9% | 3.8% | 3.9% |
| Clinic | 11.7% | 7.3% | 1% |
| Dentist | 5.2% | 3.6% | 2.5% |
| Gym | 6.3% | 5.3% | 1.8% |
| HVAC | 35.6% | 3.1% | 0.7% |
| Hair Salon | 14.9% | 8.5% | 1.3% |
| Law Firm | 4.7% | 5.5% | 3.8% |
| Local Retail | 17.1% | 40.2% | 1.2% |
| Med Spa | 5.1% | 7.9% | 2.4% |
| Nail Salon | 30.2% | 10.3% | 1.6% |
| Pet Services | 13.1% | 6% | 3.1% |
| Plumbing | 21.2% | 6.1% | 4.1% |
| Real Estate | 8.5% | 17.3% | 4.8% |
| Restaurant | 3.8% | 9.2% | 2.2% |
| Roofing | 7.6% | 4.7% | 3.7% |
Cite this
Free to quote or republish with attribution. If you are writing about this, the first line is the one to use.
In Ellment Creative's Q3 2026 Twin Cities AI Visibility Index, AI assistants named just 9 of 906 local businesses (1.0 percent) when asked from memory to recommend a provider in their category. (Ellment Creative, "Twin Cities AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026", 2026-07-31, https://ellmentcreative.com/ai-visibility-index/2026-q3)
Ellment Creative. (2026). Twin Cities AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026. Retrieved from https://ellmentcreative.com/ai-visibility-index/2026-q3
@techreport{ellment_2026_aivi, title = {Twin Cities AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026}, author = {{Ellment Creative}}, year = {2026}, institution = {Ellment Creative}, url = {https://ellmentcreative.com/ai-visibility-index/2026-q3} }
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