AI Visibility Audit for marketplaces · AI Discovery Intelligence

AI Visibility for Marketplaces: when a buyer asks AI where to buy or sell, is it you?

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity where to buy, compare options, or sell in your category, the engine recommends a marketplace. You cannot see whether it is you or a competitor - and that invisible choice is already moving your organic traffic and pushing up your cost per lead.

28 Labs measures your share of AI recommendations for the queries that drive revenue, ties it to your real traffic and CPL, and hands your teams the moves to win it back.

4 engines · intent-scored query universe · every read confidence-tagged

Measured from the outside. No SDK in your rendering path. We do not measure training-data exposure - and we say so.

The queries that move revenue

15k-25k · scored

"best marketplace to buy a used car" High intent
"where to list my apartment for rent" High intent
"top sites to hire a contractor near me" High intent
"how do online marketplaces work" Low value

A marketplace has 15,000 to 25,000 meaningful buyer queries. We score every one by commercial intent and track the set that drives revenue, not the long tail.

The shift

An AI engine is choosing a marketplace for your buyer. You cannot see the choice, but you are already paying for it.

01

You are blind to it

When a buyer asks an AI engine where to buy or sell, it names a marketplace as the answer. That recommendation happens off your property, in a place your analytics never see. You do not know if your name came back, or a competitor's.

02

It is already costing you

Demand the engine used to send you organically now lands on whoever it recommends. When that is not you, the gap shows up as softer organic traffic and a higher cost per lead - because you buy back the demand AI stopped sending you for free.

03

We make it visible

We measure your share of AI recommendations - not raw citation counts - across the high-intent queries that drive revenue, on all four engines. Then we tie the movement in that share to the movement in your traffic and CPL.

The board-level risk

Four ways an answer engine re-competes for a marketplace's core business - at the same time.

A marketplace's moat is being the place buyers and sellers go to discover, compare, and transact. Answer engines now sit in front of all three. The exposure is specific, and it is measurable.

Inventory discovery moves off your property

Buyers ask the engine what is available and what it costs. It answers from whatever sources it trusts - which may not be your listings - so the discovery moment that used to start on your marketplace now starts inside a chat window.

Disintermediation

When the engine answers the pricing, availability, and trust questions directly, the buyer has less reason to land on the marketplace at all. Your role as the place people go to decide is exactly what an answer engine is built to absorb.

Financing- and high-intent leakage

The highest-margin moments - financing, premium placement, monetisable intent - are where a competitor or a partner can get named ahead of you. That is the part of the funnel you least want decided off-platform, and the easiest to leak without seeing it.

Paid-funnel cannibalisation

The organic demand the engines used to send you now lands on whoever they recommend. To hold lead volume flat you rebuy it as paid - so a share loss you cannot see surfaces as a CPL rise you can.

Every figure we put against these is anonymised and confidence-tagged. We show the pattern and the magnitude; we never expose another marketplace's numbers to make the point.

The query universe

Not five queries per car. Twenty thousand - scored by what they are worth.

A marketplace's buyers do not ask four questions. They ask thousands, across a journey. The work is not to track 50,000 random queries. It is to score every query by commercial intent and monitor the high-intent ones that actually drive revenue, mapped to where the buyer is in the decision.

01
Research
"is buying used worth it"
02
Comparison
"which site has better deals"
03
Pricing / Valuation
"what is it actually worth"
04
Local / Availability
"what's available near me"
05
Financing
"what payment options exist"
06
Selling / Listing
"how to sell online fast"

High-intent queries near purchase, valuation, and selling carry most of the revenue. Open-ended research queries like "how the paperwork works" carry almost none. We weight what you track to where the money is - so the share number you read is the one that matters to the business, not a vanity average across the long tail.

The decision system

Your share of AI recommendations - and what it is doing to your traffic and CPL.

Most tools stop at "you were cited less." That is a metric, not a decision. We frame it as market share - the share of high-intent recommendations you hold against the competitor taking them - and we connect that share to the numbers your business already runs on.

How we keep it honest

We model the contribution. We never fake the precision.

No one can prove a single AI recommendation caused a single lead. Anyone who claims they can is selling certainty that does not exist. We treat it the way marketing-mix modeling treats a channel: we estimate the contribution from converging signals and we label the confidence of every read, so your analysts can audit any claim back to the evidence behind it.

When a read is directly observed in your own data, we say so. When it is inferred, we say so. When it rests on industry intelligence, we say that too. You never get a confident-sounding number with nothing under it.

HIGH

Directly observed. The signal is present in your own logs, CDP, or AI-engine output. We saw it happen.

MED

Inferred. Multiple independent signals converge on the same read, but no single source confirms it outright.

LOW

Industry intelligence. The read rests on category benchmarks and external patterns, not your own data. Treated as directional.

In your stack

Infrastructure, not a quarterly slide.

This is not a deck that ages the day it ships. It is a live read wired into the systems you already run, so the share number and its business impact stay current as the engines re-crawl and your competitors move.

Wired in, not bolted on

The integrated engagement connects to your logs, CDP, and paid feeds, so the AI-share read sits next to the traffic and CPL data your teams already trust. No SDK in your rendering path.

Real-time flags plus monthly

You get a flag when your share on a high-intent query set moves sharply or a competitor surges, and a monthly read that tracks the trend and ties it to traffic and CPL. Not once a quarter, on a slide.

Every read confidence-tagged

HIGH, MED, or LOW on every finding, so the team acting on it knows exactly how much weight it carries before committing engineering or budget against it.

Honest about the tiers. The live read on how much of your traffic and CPL movement is AI needs your first-party data - your logs, CDP, and paid feeds. That is the integrated, enterprise engagement, not a free snapshot. A standalone audit measures your share of AI recommendations across the four engines from the outside and shows where you are losing ground and to whom. The traffic-and-CPL loop comes when we wire into your systems.

What winning takes

Winning AI recommendations is a data-distribution problem, not a content one.

A marketplace wins when it becomes the source the engines trust to answer the category. That is structural. More blog posts will not do it. Being the authoritative, reachable source for the data buyers actually ask about will.

We diagnose where the engines already trust you, where they trust a competitor instead, and the specific moves that shift that trust toward you. The output is a build plan your teams can act on, not a list of keywords.

Start here

See where your marketplace stands in AI - and what it is costing you.

A 60-minute working session. We walk a sample audit, show you how the share read and the traffic-and-CPL loop would shape up for your category, and scope a live run.

No obligation. We do not measure training-data exposure, and we tell you what we can and cannot see before you commit.

Book a working session

60 minutes. We walk a sample audit and how your share of AI recommendations, plus the traffic-and-CPL read, would shape up for your category before scoping a live run.

No obligation. Structured executive review.