An annual reckoning of how AI systems answer commercial questions — what they cite, who they surface, where they err, and how the discoverability of businesses inside them is changing year over year.
Each February, we publish the only longitudinal record of how AI systems behave as commercial discovery infrastructure. The Annual is read by founders, marketers, agencies, regulators, journalists, and academics. It is the record, not the commentary.
The headline movements — model behaviour shifts, citation pattern changes, regulatory developments, the year's notable absences and arrivals.
What the AI Discovery Score looks like across industries, geographies, and business sizes. Where the gap is widest. Where it is closing.
Annual analysis of each Discovery Signal — Mention Frequency, Authority, Citation Quality, Entity Resolution, Schema, Authority Graph Distance, Behavioural Reinforcement, Recency Stability.
Vertical-by-vertical readouts for legal, accounting, dental, real estate, financial advice, allied health, construction, and the other indexed industries.
The full methodology document for the year. The Source Register summary. Changes from the prior edition. Editorial governance and conflicts disclosed.
Where the institution expects the field to move in the coming year. Hypotheses to test. Questions for the next Annual.
The 2026 edition is shaped by the first full year of post-search AI discovery. These are the findings most cited by the press, the regulators, and the operating teams who have read it.
Across the indexed industries, the top fifty cited sources now carry a meaningfully larger share of AI answers than they did in late 2024. Smaller, independent sources are being deprioritised at scale.
More than four in ten observed AI errors against indexed subjects trace to entity resolution failures — the system could not determine which legal entity the answer described.
Cosmetic clinics, real estate, and construction widened. Legal and accounting narrowed. The Annual analyses why, and what is likely to change in 2027.
Recency-weighted review and citation behaviour now changes scores faster than any structural signal. Operating teams are advised to instrument it.
Where Mention Frequency rises and falls with content cycles, distance to Tier I authority sources predicts AI placement most reliably across all eight indexed verticals.
The institutions most absent from AI answers are not the smallest or the youngest — they are the ones with the strongest offline reputations and the weakest authority architectures.
The Annual is not a quarterly trend report. It is the single canonical document of the year, prepared with the editorial discipline of a financial publication.
The institution drafts each part across the operational year, capturing what the Index, the engagements, and the Methodology Council have observed.
Drafting closes 1 September. From this date the document is in editorial review only; no new findings are added to the body of the edition.
The editorial committee — the Methodology Council and the Head of Practice plus one external observer — reviews the full draft against editorial standards and ratifies the findings.
Final ratification 1 November. Publication first business day of February. The Annual becomes the canonical reference for the field for the year.
The institution publishes the Annual in two editions, the same document across both, distinguished by access and physical form.
Distributed to founders, marketing leaders, agencies, journalists, and academics. PDF and web edition, fully indexable. Methodology and findings in full.
Available at no charge to qualifying recipients. Delivered February each year.
Hardback printed edition, individually numbered, archive-grade paper. Includes the year's Source Register in full, methodology supplements, and the verbatim minutes of the editorial committee.
Distributed to subscribing institutions, regulators, and academic libraries. Limited print run.
Each edition is a numbered volume in the institution's permanent record. The publication record is itself part of the methodology — the institution holds itself to a public schedule.
The 2026 Founding Edition is available now to qualifying recipients. The Institutional Edition ships in archive-grade hardback. Either way, the Annual is the document the field reads first.
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