The finding in one paragraph
We picked 10 funded B2B data, analytics, and BI companies, ranging from supply-chain forecasting to short-term rental analytics to customer-evidence platforms. We asked four leading LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) five buyer-research questions any data or marketing leader would plausibly type into an AI assistant. Each question ran 3 times per engine for variance. That produced 600 distinct LLM responses. Only 11 of those responses mentioned any of the 10 target brands by domain or by name: 8 mentioned AirDNA, 3 mentioned UserEvidence, and the remaining eight brands appeared zero times. The category is being defined by a different set of brands.
Where each brand landed
Eight of ten scored 0 / 60. Two broke through. The leader (AirDNA) earned 8 mentions out of 60 LLM responses, primarily for short-term rental analytics queries where the category is small and AirDNA is the obvious answer.
| Brand | Domain | Category | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| AirDNA | airdna.co | Short-term rental market analytics | 8 / 60 |
| UserEvidence | userevidence.com | Customer evidence and proof platforms | 3 / 60 |
| Alloy.ai | alloy.ai | Demand forecasting and supply-chain analytics | 0 / 60 |
| DatologyAI | datologyai.com | AI training-data curation | 0 / 60 |
| Bobsled | bobsled.com | Cross-cloud data sharing | 0 / 60 |
| Noda | noda.ai | Building performance analytics | 0 / 60 |
| Carpe Data | carpe.io | Insurance carrier analytics | 0 / 60 |
| Planalytics | planalytics.com | Weather analytics for retail | 0 / 60 |
| Orbee | orbee.com | Auto dealer analytics | 0 / 60 |
| Predactiv | predactiv.com | Online consumer interest data | 0 / 60 |
Who LLMs cite instead
The same 600 responses cite the brands below by name, repeatedly. These are the companies that have entered the AI-search conversation for data and analytics buyer prompts.
- Blue Yonder82
- Mashvisor65
- Kinaxis53
- Labelbox51
- Manhattan Associates36
- Scale AI36
- Encord36
- Crisp36
- Circana35
- Capterra33
- Lokad30
- Demand Solutions30
- Prodigy30
- Cleanlab30
- Trustpilot30
- ToolsGroup30
Mention counts are bolded-product-name references across all 600 LLM responses.
Methodology
This study was designed to be replicable. The exact prompts, models, settings, and matching logic are documented below. Anyone with API access to the four engines can re-run it.
Anthropic Claude (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001)
Google Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash-lite)
Perplexity (sonar)
max_tokens 800
N = 3 trials per (engine, prompt)
The 5 standardized buyer prompts
- What is the best demand forecasting platform for CPG and retail brands?
- What analytics platforms track short-term rental market trends and pricing?
- What tools help AI and ML teams curate high-quality training data?
- How do enterprises share large datasets securely across cloud providers?
- What platforms do B2B SaaS marketers use to capture verified customer proof and case studies?
The same 5 prompts were applied to every brand audit. This is the only way to make a category comparison defensible: if each brand got its own custom prompts, the rankings would reflect the prompt selection, not the brand visibility.
What this means if your data brand is on the invisible list
Most funded B2B data and analytics vendors have not entered the AI-search conversation. They invested in SEO for category keywords, in webinars, in conference presence, and in product-led growth motions. None of those signals get ingested by LLMs at the speed and scale that determines what AI assistants surface. When a CMO, head of revenue ops, or supply-chain leader asks an AI assistant a category question, the answer comes back with the brands that show up in long-form analyst writeups, in industry-press articles, in Wikipedia entries, and in third-party comparison content.
AirDNA is an instructive outlier here. Their category (short-term rental analytics) is narrow enough that they are effectively the default answer when someone asks an AI assistant about Airbnb-economy data. The other nine brands compete in broader categories where the dominant set of brands has captured the LLM training data through years of third-party content. Catching up requires a deliberate AI-visibility strategy: structured FAQ content that matches buyer-prompt phrasing exactly, schema-marked product pages, and citation footprints on the third-party sites the LLMs index.
Want to know if your data brand is invisible?
Web Cited runs the same measurement against your domain, your buyer prompts, and the engines your data audience actually uses. The Audit comes with a click-to-copy Playbook your engineers ship from in the next sprint. Five business days. Fixed price.
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