摘要
arXiv:2605.27439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude are recommendation engines, not search engines: they answer commercial queries by directly nominating brands rather than returning a list of links. Marketing to AI is therefore a broader problem than "show up in search" -- positioning, content, and product fit matter as much as discoverability. We audit ~37,000 production runs across four model configurations and 215 commercially-framed prompts spanning 19 sectors, evaluated against a 533-brand reference catalog stratified into five prominence tiers (L1 category leaders to L5 regional players) sourced from external authority lists. The ladder proxies a brand's awareness footprint within its sector, not revenue or market share. The failure mode differs sharply by tier. L1 brands appear in nearly every relevant retrieval but win only 25-41% of the recommendation slots they reach -- the leverage is differentiation, not visibility.