The 85-5 Rule: Why AI Recommends the Same 5% of Companies

85.5% of companies are classified as "emerging" with an average AI visibility score of 1.6. The top 5.2% are "leaders" averaging 93.4. There is no middle class. I named this the 85-5 rule after pulling competitive position data from 2,014 brand reports. AI recommendations follow a power law.

Want to see where your company falls? Run a free report at loamly.ai/check.

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The Distribution: No Middle Class

Across 2,014 completed brand reports (as of Feb 15, 2026), here is how companies are classified by competitive position:

Position	Companies	%	Avg AI Visibility
Emerging	1,721	85.5%	1.6
Niche	100	5.0%	36.8
Challenger	51	2.5%	60.5
Leader	104	5.2%	93.4

The gap between "emerging" and "leader" is 58x. Not a gradient. A cliff.

Only 7.7% of companies sit in the niche or challenger range. The distribution is bimodal: you are either at the bottom or at the top. The middle barely exists.

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The Score Distribution Confirms It

The visibility score distribution tells the same story from a different angle:

Score Tier	Companies	%
0-20 (Invisible)	1,726	85.7%
21-40 (Low)	115	5.7%
41-60 (Moderate)	46	2.3%
61-80 (Good)	41	2.0%
81-100 (Excellent)	86	4.3%

85.7% score 0-20. Only 4.3% score above 80. The middle tiers (21-80) contain just 202 companies out of 2,014. That is 10%.

When someone asks ChatGPT "best CRM for startups," the model recommends from a small pool. Our data shows that pool is roughly the top 15%. The other 85% are not in the consideration set.

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Why AI Creates Winner-Take-All Dynamics

Traditional search distributes attention across 10 blue links. Position 1 gets more clicks than position 10, but position 10 still exists. AI search is different.

When ChatGPT answers "best project management tool," it mentions 3-5 options. Not 10. Not 50. The top 3-5. Everyone else is invisible.

This creates a feedback loop:

1. AI recommends the most-mentioned brands
2. Users visit and validate those brands
3. More web content (reviews, comparisons) references those brands
4. AI training data reinforces the same brands
5. Next recommendation cycle, the same brands appear again

The rich get richer. The invisible stay invisible.

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What Separates Leaders From Emerging

I looked at what leaders have that emerging companies don't:

Factor	Leaders (104 companies)	Emerging (1,721 companies)
Avg Brand Authority	90.9+	~15
Wikipedia presence	~90%	~2%
50+ Reddit mentions	~85%	~10%
YouTube presence	~95%	~40%
Avg GEO Score	~65	~50

GEO scores are not the differentiator. Leaders average ~65 GEO, emerging companies average ~50. That is a 30% difference. Brand authority differs by 6x. Wikipedia presence differs by 45x.

The path from emerging to leader is not about optimizing your website. It is about building brand authority through off-site presence: Wikipedia, Reddit, industry press, thought leadership, awards.

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The Dark AI Traffic Angle

Even companies in the leader tier have a measurement problem.

Across 446,405 visits in our database, 14,413 arrived from AI platforms with no referrer headers. GA4 classifies all of them as "Direct." Dark AI traffic converts at 10.21% transactional rate vs 2.46% for non-AI traffic.

Leaders get recommended by AI. Recommendations generate traffic. But 80%+ of that traffic is invisible to standard analytics. So even leaders don't know how much AI traffic they actually receive.

If you are in the 85.5%, the question is not "how do I optimize." The question is "how do I build the brand authority to enter the consideration set." And once you do, you need detection tools that can see the traffic that results.

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Methodology

Data source: 2,014 Loamly brand reports (completed as of Feb 15, 2026).

Competitive position: Derived from AI visibility score, brand authority, and citation rates across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Each report runs 48 queries across all four platforms.

Limitation: Companies that run the check tool may skew toward those already interested in AI visibility. The sample is not random. However, the bimodal distribution (85.5% emerging vs 5.2% leaders) is consistent across every industry segment in the dataset.

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Next Steps

1. Run a free report: loamly.ai/check. See if you are in the 85.5% or the 5.2%.
2. Read the benchmark: 2,014 companies, 85.7% invisible
3. Understand the levers: Brand Authority Is 26x More Important Than Technical SEO
4. Detect your AI traffic: How to Track AI Traffic in 2026

No marketing spin. Just real data about your AI visibility.