AI Visibility Brief · August 2026
The finding, in one line
The credibility is real: a founder who ran AI for a global advertising network, Enterprise Ireland backing, an NVIDIA partnership, standing at three universities. Almost none of it is reaching the AI assistants where your buyers now build their shortlist. The gap is fixable, and most of it is fixable quickly.
The proof
We built a set of nine questions a mid-sized organisation would actually type when looking for a firm like Napkin, then ran them in fresh, unpersonalised sessions and recorded who was recommended.
Relative prominence in the assistants’ answers, from top pick to passing mention. More than fifteen Irish firms were named across the nine questions. Napkin was named in none.
On the numbers, plainly. The ChatGPT result is one observed run of the nine questions, August 2026, in which Napkin appeared in none. The Claude block is directly and independently verified. Because AI answers vary between runs, the firm standard is five runs per question on each assistant before a rate is locked. That five-run pass is the immediate next step, and it can only harden a result that already starts at zero.
Three problems
None of these is about the quality of your work. They are about what the machines that now shape a buyer’s shortlist can see, understand, and repeat.
When a buyer asks an assistant to name firms like yours, it draws on the pages and directories that describe the market. Napkin is not on them. Your competitors are.
The name is dominated by an unrelated US software product. Nothing on the public record tells an assistant which Napkin you are, so it fills the gap with the other one.
A single security setting at your site is turning away most of the AI services that answer buyer questions, while ordinary visitors and Google get through untouched.
Why this is fixable
This is a far better position than having no authority to build on. The credibility already exists. What is missing is the connective work that lets an AI find it, understand it, and repeat it to a buyer. That work is well understood and fast to begin.
One honest note before the upside. Direct traffic from AI is still small today. The prize here is not the click. It is being on the shortlist at all, because when an assistant recommends you it has already told the buyer why you fit, so the introduction arrives pre-qualified.