Ben Wills releases massive AI search visibility report across 100 industries

Ben Wills pushed his AI Search Visibility & Ranking Factors Report across 100 industries, built on 403,000 LLM prompts, 15 billion web pages and Reddit data. In launch posts on LinkedIn, Wills said the release started with 45,000-plus reports drawn from 3 petabytes of data, then said he removed the paywall and opened 651,114 charts across 1,100 market segments.

A July 21 OppAlerts page labeled the project “New AI Search Visibility & LLM Ranking Factors Report Data (July 2026),” placing it firmly in the middle of a fast-moving race to measure how brands surface inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. OppAlerts framed its own AI search visibility work as large-scale correlation research, which is the right lens for Wills’ dataset too: it is less a theory piece than a sprawling attempt to map what actually correlates with visibility across buyer personas and organic searches.

That scale matters because the field is still arguing over what AI systems trust. Garrett Sussman said on LinkedIn that it was “wild” to see so much useful data coming out around AI visibility, fan-outs, citations, personalization and shopping results. In a separate post, he warned not to make 100% decisions from single studies, a fair caution when the market is still learning which signals matter most and which assumptions fall apart once the prompt set gets bigger.

The backdrop has changed quickly. Search Engine Land published a report on October 9, 2025 saying AI search relies on brand-controlled sources, not Reddit, which is a direct challenge to the idea that community chatter alone can move answer engines. It also published a June 20, 2024 report saying Google AI Overviews were showing less often and citing less Reddit data, another sign that citation patterns in AI search are not fixed and can shift as the products change.

Wills’ release lands in that gap between speculation and measurement. A 100-industry dataset, 403,000 prompts and 651,114 charts do not settle the AI search visibility debate, but they give marketers something most small studies cannot: enough breadth to see which ranking patterns repeat, which ones break by segment, and where brand teams should stop guessing.