# GeoXylia
> AI visibility by industry 2026: median GEO-readiness scores from a 476-site benchmark. B2B SaaS 78.0, local business 68.0, and the 28-point brand gap.
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## AI Visibility by Industry 2026: Which Sectors Win AI Citations (476-Site Data)

New benchmark data: B2B SaaS leads AI visibility with a median GEO-readiness score of 78.0, while local businesses trail at 68.0. The brand gap of 28 points separates the sectors — and the sites — AI engines actually cite.

Ethan Lim2026-08-159 minShare:

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B2B SaaS leads AI visibility with a median GEO-readiness score of 78.0, while local businesses trail every vertical at 68.0 — but the 28-point brand gap between top-decile and bottom-half sites matters more than any industry difference. These are the headline numbers from GeoXylia's 476-site benchmark (Aug 2026), the largest public audit of how AI engines actually select sources.

This brief is the first in a monthly data series: original benchmark data, published with methodology, that any brand can use to set its own AI-visibility target. The numbers below are computed live from the public dataset (CSV included), never rounded from memory.

## What does the industry leaderboard look like?

Median GEO-readiness scores by vertical, from the 476-site audit:

B2B SaaS leads at 78.0 while local businesses trail at 68.0, with the overall median at 75.0 across 476 audited sites.VerticalMedian scoreSites (n)B2B SaaS78.054Tech media76.554Education76.047Finance75.050Healthcare75.045E-commerce74.047Entertainment74.052Legal74.048Travel73.544Local business68.035

The overall median is 75.0, the mean 68.4, the 10th percentile 55, and the 90th 81. The vertical spread is narrow — only 10 points separate the leader from the laggard — which is the first finding worth internalizing: industry category is a weak predictor of AI visibility.

## Why does the brand gap beat the industry gap?

The dataset's widest divide is not between industries; it is between brands. The median brand score of the overall top decile is 93, against 65 for the bottom half — a 28-point gap (GeoXylia, 2026), on par with the platform gap (28 points) and wider than the entity gap (16.5 points). AI engines cite brands they can identify, verify, and trust: branded web mentions correlate 0.664 with AI visibility (Ahrefs, 2026), and Wikipedia alone supplies 30% of ChatGPT's top-1,000 citations (Ahrefs, Jun 2026). The practical consequence: a top-decile local business (median brand score 93) outperforms a median B2B SaaS company (78.0) — execution inside a vertical beats industry choice.

## What the leader's playbook looks like

The sectors that win share three patterns, confirmed across the dataset:

- 1Entity ecosystems. B2B SaaS and tech media build consistent naming, documentation, analyst coverage, and review-platform presence. The entity gap across all sites is 16.5 points, and it is the dimension most directly tied to citation behavior.
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- 2Technical accessibility. Only 476 of 600 attempted sites completed the audit — 122 were excluded because bot protection blocked the crawlers (GeoXylia, 2026). The sectors with disciplined robots.txt policies and server-rendered pages stay visible to AI retrieval.
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- 3Original data and comparisons. Original research carries an 82% citation rate (Ziptie, 2026) and comparison content 76% (Ahrefs, 2026) — the two formats that dominate the cited set regardless of industry.
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## What this means for your brand

Set your target against your vertical's median, not the overall number. If you are B2B SaaS, the bar is 78.0; if local, the bar is 68.0 — but in both cases the winning move is the same: close the brand gap, because that is where the 28 points live. Concretely: wire your entity layer (Wikidata Q-ID, Organization schema, consistent naming), build the mention layer (50+ independent mentions from third-party coverage — 89% of citations come from earned media (Ahrefs, 2026)), and publish original data that no other source can supply. The next brief in this series will show how the leaderboard moves quarter over quarter.

## The 90th percentile: what top-decile sites do differently

The dataset's p90 sits at 81, and the sites above it share structural traits the median sites lack. Their median brand score is 93, against 65 for the bottom half — the 28-point brand gap (GeoXylia, 2026). Three patterns separate them:

- 1They are technically accessible to AI crawlers. Bot protection excluded 122 of 600 sites from the audit entirely; the top decile maintains crawl access for every retrieval bot while the bottom half often blocks them by accident.
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- 2They are entity-consistent across the web. Consistent name, description, and URL across their own domain, profiles, directories, and third-party mentions — the entity gap across all sites is 16.5 points, and it is the dimension most correlated with citation behavior.
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- 3They publish e
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