We measured our own product with our own tool. It scored 0 out of 100.

We build Citatur, a tool that measures whether AI assistants recommend your brand. We also build Domainium, an AI domain name generator. So we did the obvious thing and pointed one at the other.

The result was a flat 0 out of 100. Not once, but across three separate audits: 16 July, 17 July and 8 August 2026. Ten buyer-intent questions, four platforms, forty answers per audit. 120 answers in total, zero mentions of Domainium. The name never appeared, in prose or in a citation. Total cost of the three measurements: 29 cents.

Most companies in our market would turn that into a scare campaign. We are going to do the opposite, because the honest reading of this data does not support selling you anything.

When we ask "what is the best AI domain name generator?" or "how do I find a domain for my startup?", the assistants do recommend brands. Just not ours. Share of voice across the August audit:

• Namecheap: 38%
• Namelix: 25%
• GoDaddy: 21%
• Domainr: 8%
• Squadhelp: 8%
• Domainium: 0%

The ranking barely moved across the three audits. Namecheap held between 38 and 41 percent throughout, Namelix drifted up from 20 to 25. This is a settled category, not a volatile one.

Look at the top of that list. Instant Domain Search is the single most cited domain in the category, ahead of Namecheap and Namelix. It was not in our tracked competitor list, because when we set that list up in July we picked the brands we thought mattered.

That is the first lesson, and it has nothing to do with buying software: the brands you compete against in AI answers are not always the brands you compete against in the market.

Fourth on the list is reddit.com, the only domain in the top ten that is not a competitor's own site. Threads in r/Domains, r/SideProject and r/branding get quoted as evidence. If the community does not mention you, the assistant has nothing to cite.

A visibility score is a proxy, so we cross-checked it against actual traffic.

Over 90 days, Domainium received zero referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai or Gemini. Not a handful. Zero. Google and Bing sent traffic, Facebook sent traffic, the AI assistants sent nothing at all.

The score said 0. The traffic said 0. The measurement was honest.

Here is where we expected to write the usual conclusion: AI search is taking over, fix your AI visibility now. We went looking for the data to support it and did not find it.

• Google still sends roughly 190 times more traffic than ChatGPT, across a 76,000-site sample.
• Web search inside ChatGPT is shrinking as a share of usage, from around 46% of queries in late 2024 to 34.5% in February 2026.
• Transactional queries are the least affected by AI Overviews. Informational queries lose over 33 points of click-through rate; tool and purchase queries lose under 10. "Domain name generator" is a tool query.
• The category leader is not shrinking. Namelix still draws hundreds of thousands of visits a month, roughly half from organic search.

So for this specific category, in August 2026, the answer layer is not where the customers are. Our 0 is a real measurement of a channel that barely exists for us yet.

What we found instead is more interesting than a visibility score, and it is not a search problem at all.

In April 2026, GoDaddy published an official MCP server for domain search and availability, listed as a verified integration in both the ChatGPT and Anthropic directories. Public, no authentication, with purchase links rendered directly in the conversation.

That is not competition for a citation. That is the assistant doing the job itself, with a registrar collecting the transaction at the source. The risk to a standalone domain tool was never that ChatGPT would recommend a competitor instead. It is that ChatGPT would stop needing to recommend anyone.

A visibility score cannot see that coming. It measures who gets named in an answer, not whether the answer still needs to name anyone.

If you run a brand and you are wondering whether to invest in AI visibility, this is the sequence we would defend:

1. Measure before you spend. An audit costs about the price of a coffee and takes a minute. A content program costs weeks. Doing them in that order is not a sales pitch, it is arithmetic.
2. Cross-check the score against your referral data. If your analytics show real AI traffic and your score is low, you have a fixable visibility problem. If both are zero, ask the next question before spending anything.
3. Ask whether the channel exists for your category at all. Ours does not, yet. Yours might. The point is that this is knowable, cheaply, in advance.
4. A score of zero is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Sometimes it means your content is invisible. Sometimes it means the channel is not where your buyers are. Those two situations look identical on a dashboard and call for opposite decisions.

A technical note, because it changed how we read our own numbers.

Perplexity cites the most and names the fewest. In the August audit it produced 42 citations across ten answers, more than any other platform, yet only one of those ten answers named a tracked brand in prose. It answers generically and links out, rather than recommending by name.

If you read a share-of-voice figure from Perplexity without checking how many answers it rests on, you can see a confident-looking 50% built on a single response. We now weight that figure by the number of answers naming at least one brand, and we would suggest the same scepticism toward any AEO dashboard, including ours.

Every figure in this article came from the engine behind our public AI visibility leaderboard, run against a product we own, for a total of 29 cents. If you want the same numbers for your own brand, including the per-platform split and the cited sources, you can run a free audit in about a minute.

If it comes back at zero, do what we did: check your referral data, and ask whether the channel is real for your category before spending a euro on fixing it.