The clients agencies showcase as their best work score 40/100 on AI visibility

When a marketing or SEO agency wants to win your business, it shows you its portfolio: the client it ranked #1, the case study with the traffic chart, the logo wall of businesses it's proud to have worked on. That work is real. But it was optimized for a world where customers found businesses through Google's ten blue links — not one where a growing share of them ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude "who's the best [X] near me?" and act on a single spoken-style answer.

So we ran a test. We collected 45 businesses that US and UK agencies feature as showcase clients on their own websites, and audited each one for AI visibility — not the agency, the client. Here is what we found.

The finding: showcase clients average 40/100

Read that median again: 33 out of 100. Half of the clients an agency picked as its best examples scored below a third. On average, when an AI engine was asked a real question a customer in that business's category and city would ask, the client appeared in fewer than 4 of 6 answers — and in 40% of cases, 2 or fewer. The businesses these agencies want the world to know they helped are, more often than not, not the ones AI names.

Why this happens even to well-marketed businesses

This isn't a knock on the agencies — it's a gap in what agency work has historically measured. AI engines don't rank a list; they synthesize an answer from what they can find and trust about a category. A business can have a fast site, clean schema, strong reviews and page-one Google rankings and still be absent from that synthesis, because the signals that move an AI answer — consistent third-party mentions, structured facts an engine can lift, presence in the sources engines actually cite — are a distinct discipline that most SEO retainers never explicitly targeted. The result is exactly what the data shows: portfolio-grade clients with sub-40 AI visibility.

It's also invisible from the inside. AI answers change run to run (we've measured that separately), so a single check on a good day tells an owner nothing. And the engines diverge — a business can be a fixture on one engine and a coin flip on another (the engine-by-engine gap). Which is why the number is a surprise to the agency as often as to the client.

What this means if you run an agency

Your existing clients almost certainly have this gap — and it is the shortest path to a new conversation you can have. You don't have to sell them on a problem in the abstract; you show them, by name, that AI recommends a competitor of theirs and not them. That artifact is what wins a GEO (generative engine optimization) retainer, and it's a service you're already 80% equipped to deliver, because the fixes — mentions, structured facts, cited sources — overlap heavily with what you already do.

That's why we built a white-label version. AskedAbout's Agency 5-pack is $249 for five full audits you can put your own logo on — each one a 300-answer report (25 real customer questions × 4 engines × 3 samples) showing a client their true mention rate per engine, the named competitors beating them, and a prioritized fix plan. Run one on your best client, hand them the report, and let the engines make the argument for the retainer.

Want to see the gap for a specific business first? Run a free check — it takes about a minute and no card.

Methodology

Between 12 and 15 July 2026 we identified 45 local businesses (US and UK) that marketing, SEO and GEO agencies feature as case studies or named clients on their own public portfolio pages. For each business we ran an AskedAbout mini-audit: our engine poses 6 AI answers to category-and-location questions a prospective customer would ask, and scores 0–100 based on how often and how prominently the business is named versus competitors. Scores and appearance counts are the engine's own output, aggregated across the 45 businesses; duplicates were removed so each business and agency is counted once. The mini-audit is a lighter probe than our full 300-answer audit and is intended to surface the visibility gap, not to be a definitive per-engine breakdown. No client, agency or competitor is named on this page.