Pro Tool
When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend the best tool in your category, who does it name first? The Vertical AI Leaderboard shows citation rates, mention positions, and model coverage for every brand in your space.
Example output
What the leaderboard tracks
The percentage of AI queries in which a brand is mentioned when asked about its category. The primary metric for AI share of voice in any vertical.
Where in the AI response a brand appears, first mention, second mention, or buried. Position 1 in an AI recommendation carries far more weight than position 5.
Which specific AI models cite a brand: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini each have distinct training data and citation behavior. Full model coverage = maximum AI reach.
Each brand's underlying AI readiness score from Faro's 30+ check audit. High citation rate without readiness investment usually means the brand got lucky with early coverage.
How it works
Provide any business domain and its market category, CRM software, marketing agencies, project management tools, whatever your vertical is. The leaderboard builds around that category.
Faro sends category-level recommendation prompts to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini in real time. Each model generates a ranked response listing the businesses it recommends in your space.
The leaderboard shows citation rate (how often each brand is mentioned), average mention position, and which specific AI models cite them. Your position relative to competitors is calculated across all three.
AI model behavior changes as they're updated and as new content enters the web. Pro users can run the leaderboard repeatedly to track position changes, and see whether optimization work is moving the needle.
Why this matters now
Research across AI purchasing journeys found that brands cited in AI recommendations see 182% higher purchase intent than brands discovered through traditional search. ChatGPT alone has more than 200 million weekly active users, and every one of them who asks a product recommendation question is getting an AI-curated shortlist. If your brand isn't on that shortlist, you're invisible at the moment of highest intent.
The businesses that win AI share of voice in 2025 and 2026 are the ones that acted before their competitors understood the problem. The Vertical AI Leaderboard shows you exactly where you stand today, and what the gap looks like between you and the brands that AI models consistently recommend.
Check your leaderboard positionCommon questions
A vertical leaderboard shows which businesses are most frequently cited by AI models, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, when a user asks for recommendations in a specific category. It's the equivalent of a Google rank tracker, but for AI-generated answers instead of search results.
Faro sends multiple recommendation prompts to each AI model, variations of 'what's the best [category] tool?' and 'recommend a [category] solution for [use case]'. Citation rate is the percentage of those queries in which a brand appears in the AI response.
Pro users can run a fresh leaderboard at any time. The data reflects live AI model behavior at the time of the query, not a cached result. Since AI models update frequently, regular tracking is important for understanding position shifts.
Yes. The Vertical Leaderboard is built around categories, not individual brands. When you enter your domain and vertical, Faro identifies the top brands AI models cite in your space and ranks all of them, including you.
Research by Scrunch found that AI-cited brands saw 182% higher purchase intent among users who discovered them through AI recommendations versus traditional search. As AI usage grows, ChatGPT has 200M+ weekly active users, AI citation is becoming a primary discovery channel for B2B and B2C buyers.
The fastest improvements come from fixing the AI readiness gaps Faro identifies: allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt, deploying structured data and llms.txt, publishing comparison content that answers the specific questions AI models search for, and building the trust signals (reviews, sameAs markup, pricing transparency) that AI models use to evaluate credibility.
Start with a free AI Readiness Scan, then upgrade to Pro to unlock the Vertical Leaderboard and see your real citation position across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.