The NYC AI Visibility Index

What Is the NYC AI Visibility Index?

The NYC AI Visibility Index tracks how often New York City businesses get mentioned, recommended, and positively described when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or Perplexity a buying question instead of typing it into Google. It runs on AIR Score, a 0-100 composite built by Deep AI Solutions.

Here's the honest version: there is no published NYC ranking yet, and we're not going to invent one. What exists today is a live national index in a different vertical and a published Houston study proving the methodology holds at metro scale. NYC is the market we're measuring next — and the businesses that request a free scan first get the clearest read on where they stand before there's a public ranking here at all. If you've already asked yourself whether ChatGPT knows your business exists, this index is how we find out with a number instead of a guess.

How Does AIR Score Actually Work?

AIR Score is a trademark of Deep AI Solutions. It's a composite 0-100 number built from three inputs, measured across five AI systems — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Grok (xAI), and Perplexity:

• Mention — does the AI bring up your business at all when someone asks a relevant question?
• Recommendation — when it does, is your business positioned as a suggested option, or just named in passing?
• Sentiment — is the framing positive, neutral, or negative?

A business can rank #1 on Google and still score near zero on AIR, because AI systems don't read search rankings — they read what's written about a business in a form they can extract, cite, and repeat back. That gap between search rank and AI visibility is exactly what NYC SEO vs. AI Visibility breaks down in more detail, and it's the gap this index exists to close.

Why Does This Matter for NYC's 183,000 Businesses?

New York City has more than 183,000 small businesses in operation — the highest count in the city's history — supporting 4.8 million jobs, according to the NYC Department of Small Business Services (Dec 2025). Statewide, New York counts 422,000-plus small business establishments, 3.7 million employees, and roughly $1 trillion in sales and revenues, per a March 2026 report from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

That's the base competing for the same finite set of AI-generated answers — whether the question comes from a Midtown office worker, a Financial District analyst, a DUMBO startup, or a Long Island City buyer one stop from Manhattan. And the AI layer isn't a side channel anymore: Google AI Overviews now appear in roughly half of all Google searches, according to D&D SEO Services (2026), and about 1 in 3 U.S. adults use an AI chatbot at least weekly, per Pew Research data cited by iQDigital (2026). If an AI system never mentions your business, a growing share of buyers never see you as an option.

What Does the Live National Index Show Right Now?

Deep AI Solutions runs a live, published AI Visibility Index at deepaivisibility.com/ai-visibility-index. Edition 01, measured 2026-07-09, covers the national HVAC and plumbing category: 1,103 brand mentions logged across the five AI systems, with Roto-Rooter ranked #1 at a 10.0% mention share.

That's real, published scan data — not a projection, not a sample. It's also not NYC, and it's not every industry. We're showing it here because it's proof the measurement works end to end, and because the same scanning methodology is what runs against every NYC business that requests a scan, regardless of when a formal NYC edition publishes.

What Did the Published Houston Study Find?

Our published research — the Houston AI Visibility Index study — found a metro-wide median AIR Score of 31 out of 100 across the businesses measured. Most businesses in that market were essentially invisible to AI systems.

We're citing Houston because it's sourced, published research demonstrating how AIR Score behaves at city scale — not because it predicts anything about New York. NYC is a different market with a different competitive base, a different mix of industries, and a different starting point. Until we run the scan here, any specific NYC number would be a guess, and we don't publish guesses.

Why Is NYC the Hardest Market in This Network to Measure?

Every honesty rule we hold to matters more here than anywhere else in this network. New York is home turf for the category leader: Profound, the AI-visibility platform, is headquartered in New York, was founded in August 2024, and raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation with roughly 700 enterprise customers, according to Fortune (Feb 2026). NoGood, an NYC growth agency, runs a standalone answer-engine-optimization service it launched in May 2025 with LLM-citation tracking. Mimvi SEO markets itself from Manhattan as a top-rated AI SEO provider. Semrush's 2026 directory lists 55 SEO agencies serving NYC alone.

We're not first here, and we're not the biggest. What we compete on is being honest about what's actually measured versus what's marketed, transparently priced, and openly scored — against well-funded incumbents who mostly sell reports without showing the underlying scan data.

Why Does a Texas Company Run the NYC Index?

Deep AI Solutions is headquartered in Houston, Texas — 3050 Post Oak Blvd, Suite 510 — and serves NYC businesses remotely, as one market inside a nationwide, remote-native practice. There's no local office, and we're not going to imply one.

AI-visibility work is measurement and engineering: scanning what five AI systems say about a business, fixing the structured content those systems pull from, and re-scanning to track whether the number moves. None of that requires a desk in Midtown or FiDi — it requires a working scanner and a methodology you can check, which is what the live national index and the Houston study both exist to prove. That's a different pitch than most of the 55 agencies in Semrush's NYC directory are making.

How Do You Get Your NYC Business Scored?

NYC doesn't have a published AIR Score edition yet. Businesses that get scanned in the first wave will be the first in this market with an actual number — before there's a public AIR Score ranking for anyone to compete against.

• Free instant scan — run your business through the same scanner behind the live index: deepaivisibility.com/#scanner.
• Talk to us directly — call +1 (281) 937-3337.
• See what's included — Signal ($1,299/mo), Authority ($2,999/mo), and Dominance ($5,999/mo), month-to-month with no setup fee, detailed on our services page and AI SEO NYC overview. If you want the specific playbook first, start with how to get recommended by ChatGPT in NYC.

Every business scanned early becomes a data point in the first NYC edition. The score you get back today is the baseline you measure against later.