The WordOut blog · July 15, 2026

We scored 499 Boise businesses for AI visibility. 71% were invisible.

By the WordOut team

This month we ran 499 Boise and Treasure Valley businesses through the same scoring engine that powers our free GEO check. Every business got a 0–100 score built from three pillars: whether AI assistants actually name them when asked for a recommendation, whether the sources the engines trust can find them, and whether their own website is readable to AI crawlers.

The results:

• The average score was 38 out of 100.
• 71% were effectively invisible — when you ask an AI assistant "who should I call?" for their category in their city, they are not the answer, and mostly not any of the answers.
• The worst-scoring industries were the ones you'd least expect to be hiding: financial advisors and planners averaged in the mid-20s, with plumbers, electricians, and home-services companies close behind.

What "invisible" means in practice

It doesn't mean the assistant says something bad about you. It means you're simply absent. Someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI for a financial advisor in Boise, gets two or three confident names, and yours isn't among them. The customer never knows you existed, and you never know you were skipped. That's what makes this different from a bad review — there's no signal to react to.

Who scored well

The visible 29% shared a pattern: they exist in places other than their own website. Local news mentions. Industry directories with consistent name-address-phone details. Real answers to real questions published on their site, in text an AI crawler can read — not locked inside images or blocked by a firewall rule nobody remembers setting.

None of it is exotic. That's the actual finding: the bar for being the answer in a market like Boise is low, because almost nobody has cleared it. The businesses that clear it first get named first — and AI assistants, once they have a good answer, are not in a hurry to change it.

Score your own business — it takes about a minute, and the number comes with the specific reason it isn't higher.