FrontStat data

AI visibility report, October 2026: 73% of new products are invisible to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in launch week

By Alex, maker of FrontStat · Updated 8 October 2026 · 8 min read

FrontStat checks every product that makes its weekly launch board. In its launch week, each product gets the question its buyers would ask, put to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini with web search on, and a record of whether each assistant named it, who it named instead, and which pages it cited. This is what 347 of those checks, run between 17 September and 7 October 2026, add up to.

The short version: almost no new product is visible to AI search in its launch week, the three assistants disagree with each other, launch listings do not change the answer, and the one thing that does is whether the assistant read a page about you.

Three in four new products are named by nobody

Each product's main buyer question, one answer per assistant, strict counting: "recommended" means named as an option for that question.

These are products that launched on Show HN, Product Hunt, Uneed, BetaList and the other launch sites that week, with a working site and a clear description. Launch week is when founders look at AI visibility for the first time, and for three in four of them the honest answer is zero.

The three assistants do not agree

Claude named three times as many new products as Gemini. The second column comes from a separate question, "What is product?": "wrong" means it described a different company, "thin" means it only knew a directory listing, "could not find" is what it says. Claude was the most generous recommender and the most often lost, which fits an assistant that searches widely and reads whatever it finds.

The practical consequence: a check on one assistant is not a check. A product can be Claude's first pick and absent from Gemini on the same day, and buyers use both.

The fact that separates 51% from 8%

For each product, we split the 347 by one fact at a time and compared how often each half was recommended by at least one assistant.

The first row is the report. When an assistant read the product's own site while forming its answer, it named the product half the time. When it did not, it named the product one time in twelve. Everything else on the list is a way of making the first row true: a correct description and a first-place result for your name are what get your site into the reading list.

The last two rows are the uncomfortable ones for launch-week advice. Being on more launch sites, or having a listing whose link Google counts, made no difference at all to whether an assistant named the product that week. Launch listings are for launch day and, in a few cases, for a link; they are not an AI visibility strategy.

What the assistants read

Of 1,041 answers, 688 (66%) cited at least one page, and 181 (17%) cited the product's own site. The hosts cited most, across all products:

GitHub, twice. For developer products, a public repository with a README that says what the product is doubles as the page the assistant cites. App store listings do the same for mobile products. Product Hunt, the launch site most founders spend the most effort on, was cited in 11 answers out of 1,041.

Who gets named instead

When an assistant did not name the product, it named someone. The names that came up most across all 347 questions were established products: Canva, Descript, Otter.ai, Loom, Zapier, PostHog, Vercel, Railway, Clay. For a quarter of the products, all three assistants agreed on at least one of the names. A new product is rarely competing with another new product for the answer; it is competing with the incumbent the assistant already knows, and the page that mentions the incumbent is the one to get onto.

Where the overall score lands

FrontStat's launch score adds four parts: AI recommendations, launch listings, links that count, and search for the product's own name. Across the 347 products it ran from 11 to 76, with a median of 45 and no product above 80. The AI part is where the room is: only 7 of the 347 scored full marks on it. More on what the number means in What is a good AI visibility score?

Method

Products: every launch that made FrontStat's weekly board between 17 September and 7 October 2026 and received a launch-week report with answers from all three assistants, 347 in total, one report per product (the first). Question: one buyer question per product, written from the product's own site, phrased the way a buyer asks and never naming the product. Assistants: ChatGPT and Gemini through their APIs with web search on; Claude with web search. Counting: "recommended" means named as an option for the question; "describes correctly" is judged on a separate "What is product?" answer. Citations: the pages each answer listed as sources, counted once per answer per host. A change in an answer is confirmed on ChatGPT and Gemini with two further samples before FrontStat reports it to a founder; the figures above use each product's first launch-week check. How each check works is on the method pages.

This report will be updated as the sample grows. The numbers for your own product take 30 seconds with the free checker.

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