Studies
Our own research on AI visibility
Growfer runs these studies to learn how websites show up to AI systems, and we publish what we find.
Alongside the product, we run our own research into how AI assistants find and cite websites. We publish the results here so anyone working on AI visibility can use them.
Our studies so far cover news publishers, where we checked the robots.txt files of 6,963 US newspaper websites, and small-business pricing, where we tested whether Gemini and Perplexity surface published prices for 1,123 US businesses. Each study page lists its sample and the research it draws on.
- StudiesWe studied 1,123 small businesses. Publishing prices wasn't enough for AI to answer.We examined pricing across 1,123 US small businesses and tested whether Gemini and Perplexity could surface it. Businesses publishing prices on their own sites were roughly twice as likely to have those prices surfaced. The engines still failed to surface an answer about half the time. Publishing information is not the same as making it answerable.Read →
- StudiesBlocking GPTBot while leaving Google open doesn’t hide you from AI. It just costs you traffic.A common robots.txt config at US newspaper sites disallows AI crawlers by name while leaving the wildcard user-agent, including Google, fully open. Anything Google can read, an AI assistant can read too. The block doesn’t work as intended, and per a recent Rutgers/Wharton study, it correlates with lower traffic, not protection.Read →
More studies are on the way.
