Last week I ran a test on a founder I work with. It surprised me, then it surprised me again.
He’s raised over $100 million. He made TIME’s best inventions list. Forbes 30 Under 30. He’s posted on LinkedIn, consistently, for two years.
So I opened four AI engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, and asked the broad version of the questions a stakeholder asks. Who leads this category. Who are the people to follow. Where would a great engineer want to work.
He didn’t come up once. I almost left the test there. But then something occurred to me.
More and more of the people who decide your next two years start with an AI.
Your next investor’s analyst. A buyer sizing up the market. A senior engineer weighing offers. Not all of them, not yet. But the number who open ChatGPT before they open their network climbs every quarter. Among B2B buyers, 89% already use generative AI somewhere in their buying research (Forrester).
Whatever the AI hands back is the shortlist they start from. And you’re either on it or you’re not.
And no, the AI isn’t measuring who’s best. It’s measuring who’s legible to it. That’s worse, because your buyer can’t tell the difference, and acts on the answer anyway.
Findable isn’t discoverable.
When I asked the same engines straight out, “what do you know about him,” they knew everything. The raise, the investors, his degree, the press. Instantly.
So the information isn’t missing. It’s just not wired to the questions that decide anything. If you already know his name, he’s one search away. If you don’t, he may as well not exist.
Then I asked the questions his buyers would actually ask.
My first questions were generic, the way you’d check if someone’s a household name. But his buyers don’t think globally. They’re buying in one place. He sells in a single US state, where his company’s scaling and busy every day.
So I asked again, scoped to that market. He went from nowhere to number 1. The AI named his company first, and named him personally as the founder to follow.
That’s why I’m glad I didn’t stop early. He’s not invisible. He spent years and a hundred million dollars becoming the obvious answer in the one market that pays his bills, and the generic lens couldn’t see it.
Visibility is a map, not a score.
One AI search doesn’t tell you whether you’re visible. It tells you whether you’re visible in one square of the map, to one kind of buyer. Change the market or the question, and the answer changes with it.
There are two ways to misread your own result. The first: you run a single broad search, see nothing, and decide you’re nowhere, when you may already own the market you actually sell to. The second costs more, and it’s the more common one. You own your home square, the searches close to you look fine, you feel safe, and you never notice that the market you’re about to expand into is wide open, with your next investor and your next hire already searching it.
Each square belongs to whoever the AI names today. The longer it names someone else, the harder it sets.
“But he raised $100M anyway. Does creating content even matter?”
Yeah, he did, while the global category had mostly never heard of him. But he’s one of the few founders who could afford that. He was an investor before he was a founder. He started a venture firm at 18 and spent almost a decade building the relationships that later wrote him checks and taught him how the game works. He had a head start that 99.9% of climate tech founders simply don’t.
His network closed the round. Visibility is what unlocks the tier beyond it: the customer two states over, the engineer who’s never heard his name, the next investor who isn’t already a friend. That’s what visibility does. So if you think starting a VC firm, investing successfully for years, then transitioning into founding a company is easier than building the content library that makes you discoverable, that’s a new flavor of crazy.
Run it on yourself.
Two searches, five minutes.
First, pick the market you actually sell in, not the whole world. Ask the one question your investor, customer, or next hire would type: “Who leads [your category] in [your market]?” Read who comes back. If it’s a competitor, a consultant, or a researcher, and not you, that square belongs to someone else right now. That’s the space you could challenge and own, especially if your buyers are there.
Then search your own name. Maybe the AI knows your company and your raise. Maybe it knows nothing yet. Depending on what you see, you’ll know exactly how much work your company and your personal brand still have to do.
That distance is the whole game.
