Portfolio AI-visibility auditWhen a buyer asks AI for the best tools in their category, 37% of this portfolio simply doesn't exist.
Seven of nineteen companies were named by no engine, for no prompt. Their competitors were named every time. Here is the receipt.
The first receipt
One question. Five answers.
None of them the company.
We asked three answer engines the plainest buying question in this category. Here is what Perplexity returned, verbatim. The company that does exactly this was not on the list.
Perplexity · Google AI Overview · ChatGPT — asked verbatim, logged out
The company— not mentioned —The scoreboard
Nineteen companies, seven chances each to appear.
Every company got the same test: three real buyer prompts, run across three engines, scored on how many of seven cells named them. Ten of nineteen scored one or zero. Not one deep-tech or invented-category company cleared the middle.
The pattern
The invisible ones all made the same mistake.
Sorted least visible to most, the board splits cleanly in two. Keep it in view as the reason scrolls past.
The bottom and the top of this board are not random.
The companies that scored zero share one habit. The companies that scored well share the opposite one. It is the most fixable finding in the whole audit.
Every invisible company leads with a category it invented.
Huskeys sells "Edge Security Management." Blast sells "Preemptive Cloud Defense." Euno sells an "AI Context Platform." Safebooks sells an "agentic platform." Nobody types those phrases into an engine, so the engine never has a reason to return them.
Engines hand the coined category to a competitor.
Ask about Huskeys' own phrase, "edge security," and the engine confidently answers with Zscaler and the SASE vendors instead. The invented category doesn't just fail to surface the company. It routes the buyer straight to the incumbent.
Every visible company owns a phrase the market already searches.
qbiq owns "test fit." Zorro owns "ICHRA." Obligo owns "deposit-free renting." Cassidy owns "gene-editing design." These are not cleverer companies. They picked a name the buyer was already using.
Visibility here is a naming decision before it is a technical one.
The gap between 0/7 and 5/7 in this portfolio is mostly the gap between a category a founder wished into existence and one a buyer is already typing. That is a copy fix, and it is free.
Three drivers
Naming is the biggest lever. It isn't the only one.
Three forces separated the visible from the invisible, and every one of them is something a founder can move.
Answer engines quote listicles. They don't read your homepage first.
The single cleanest pair in the audit: Dtect has the best-built site in the whole cohort, a category-perfect headline and clean markup, and scores 0/7. Zorro has a weaker site, no schema, a slogan for a headline, and scores 4/7. The difference is that Zorro sits inside the "best ICHRA platforms" listicles the engines cite, and Dtect sits inside none of the deepfake-detection ones.
A Calcalist byline is quietly an AI-visibility asset.
When Google's AI Overview surfaced an early-stage company from this portfolio, it very often cited the same handful of sources: Calcalist and CTech. OneStep, Quantum Source and Remondo all appear in AI answers specifically because the press wrote them up and the engine trusts the press.
One site is a blank page to any crawler that doesn't run JavaScript.
Robots.txt is wide open across all nineteen, so nothing is being deliberately blocked. But one site is client-side rendered — its raw HTML is nearly empty, so a non-JavaScript crawler sees a blank shell even though a browser shows a full page. Across the cohort, slogan headlines and a near-total absence of FAQ-style structured data are the norm, not the exception.
Field notes
What the audit turned up along the way.
Small things you only find by opening every site and running every query by hand. A few are fixes worth a founder's afternoon.
Two broken entries on 10D's own site.
The portfolio page links a dead domain for Obligo (myobligo.co; the live site is obligo.com), and still lists Mentee Robotics as active though it exited to Mobileye for $900M. Both are a two-minute fix.
A hero advertising "$0B+".
Safebooks' homepage renders its trust metrics as unfilled placeholders — "$0B+" and "+0%" — in production. A machine reading the page sees zeroes; so does a buyer.
One site is walled off by its own CDN.
MedOrion sits behind an aggressive Cloudflare challenge that turns away any non-JavaScript client — we had to defeat it with a real browser to read the page. A risk worth watching, though Google still indexed it, so it isn't the whole story.
One Wikipedia page. One ChatGPT mention. Same company.
OneStep is the only company of nineteen with its own Wikipedia article — and the only early-stage company ChatGPT named without being led there. Off-site authority is the lever, in a single data point.
Company by company
Nineteen diagnoses. Two or three fixes each.
Every company, what appeared instead of it, and the specific, mostly-free changes that would move its score. Generous on the diagnosis, honest about what sits outside a website's control.
Method
Why this is data, not opinion.
Every prompt was written and locked before a single query ran, so nothing could be cherry-picked after seeing results. Each company was scored the same mechanical way. The point was to build something a founder can trust, and reproduce.
Seven of these companies are invisible to the engine their next buyer is already asking. None of them know it yet.
The diagnosis is free. The fix is a conversation. → idovadavker.com