We asked AI about 20 small US brands. 18 of them never came up.

⏰ The short version

• We ran 20 indie US DTC brands through the 30 questions their customers actually ask AI.
• 18 of 20 (90%) came up in zero of them. Average: 0.10 out of 30.
• These weren't bad brands. Bean-to-bar chocolate makers, one-woman ceramics studios, herbalists with 30 years in.
• We ran the same test on 284 Korean brands and got 65% at zero. Different market, same gap.
• Nobody has claimed this ground yet. That's the whole point.

Why we counted

"AI search matters" is easy to say. What's hard to find is a number for how badly brands are actually missing. So we measured it.

The method is simple. Crawl the brand's site, pull the body text, then check it against the 30 questions a shopper in that category would type into ChatGPT. For each question: is there something here that could be quoted as an answer?

💡 What "counts as an answer" means Not whether a keyword appears. Whether a sentence exists that could be lifted into an AI answer. AI can't cite "Radiance Serum ✨". It can cite "vitamin C serum for sensitive skin, fragrance-free."