I’m co-organizing a new event called Applied.

The idea is simple: bring together 100 B2B SaaS operators in Lisbon for a day of practical talks on marketing, growth, product, and AI.

• Motivational BS ❌

• Recycled presentations ❌

• Booths and pitches all over the place ❌

The first edition is free to attend, but we’re keeping it intentionally small, so spots are limited.

If that sounds like your kind of event, I’d love to see you there.

Apply here

At Minuttia, we partnered with Convex Works to run (what I believe) is a very important study on AI visibility for SaaS brands.

We measured 24,067 prompts across five AI search engines: Google Search + AIO, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.

The full study is live at study.minuttia.com, and it has far more data than I can cover in a single note.

So I picked four findings that I think matter most for anyone running SEO or AEO right now.

Let’s go.

AI Overviews trigger on almost everything

The first thing that jumped out: AI Overviews are not a niche feature.

They appeared on 97.7% of alternative prompts and 92.9% of category prompts in our dataset.

Brand-name searches told a different story.

Only 21.5% of those returned an AIO. But when buyers are actively evaluating software with queries like “alternatives to X” or “best Y tools,” Google is serving an AI-generated answer on virtually every single one.

For commercial SaaS queries, AIO is no longer something that might appear. It is the default.

If you rank in Google’s top 10, AI engines are far more likely to name you

To me, this is the most important finding of the study.

For every AI search engine we measured, brands whose official domain ranked in Google’s organic top 10 were far more likely to be mentioned.

Google AIO showed the strongest association at 11.6x, followed by Gemini at 10.5x, Perplexity at 9.5x, Claude at 7.9x, and ChatGPT at 6.9x.

Read those numbers again. An 11.6x higher likelihood of being named by Google AIO if your domain appears in that search’s organic results, and a 6.9x multiplier on ChatGPT. Across every engine, the pattern held.

That is the strongest evidence I have seen for something I have been saying for a while: SEO and AEO are not separate disciplines.

Organic visibility feeds AI visibility. If your site ranks on Google, you are starting from a position of strength in AI search, and if it does not, you are competing at a structural disadvantage.

Let’s move on to the next one.

AI engines rarely agree on which brands to recommend

Here is the other side of that coin.

When we looked at how often all five AI engines named the same brand for the same search, the consistency was surprisingly low.

54% of recommended brands on alternative searches appeared in only one engine’s answer. Just 8% were named by all five.

This carries real strategic weight.

If you are tracking your brand’s visibility on ChatGPT alone, you are seeing at most half the picture.

Each engine builds its answer from a different mix of sources and signals, and the brand lists they produce overlap far less than most people assume.

One more to go.

Review volume matters. Star ratings do not.

The last finding I want to highlight caught me slightly off guard.

We compared AI mention rates against G2 review data, broken out by review volume and star rating within each software category.

Brands in the top quartile by review count appeared in AIO at 7.6x the rate of the bottom quartile on category prompts and 5.9x on alternative prompts.

Star ratings? The multiplier was 0.9x. No meaningful association at all.

This tells us something about how AI engines weigh third-party signals.

Volume of social proof, meaning the sheer number of people who bothered to leave a review, appears to matter.

Whether those reviews average 4.2 or 4.8 stars does not seem to move the needle.

For anyone investing in review generation as part of their AEO program, the priority is clear: get more reviews.

Worrying about your average rating is not where the signal lives, at least when it comes to AI visibility.

The rest of the data

These four findings are the ones I wanted to spend time on. The complete report covers twelve research questions plus additional analyses, from branded queries to category-level breakdowns.

You can explore everything at study.minuttia.com. Every chart is downloadable, and the complete aggregate dataset is available for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

Final Thoughts

We built this study because I got tired of the conversation around SaaS AI search being driven by anecdotes and one-off screenshots.

After conducting it, two things are clearer than before (to me, anyway):

1. Organic search visibility and AI search visibility are deeply connected.

2. The signals that influence AI mentions are not always the ones you would expect.

If any of this changes how you think about your own program, I would like to hear about it.

A note on the frequency of this newsletter:

This month I have a busy speaking schedule, with two gigs in India and Iceland. On top of that, demand at Minuttia is at an all-time high, and Applied, the events business I co-founded, is picking up faster than we planned for. All good problems, but they take time.

I enjoy writing these notes, but I cannot do everything and do it right. So I cannot tell you when the next one will land in your inbox. What I can promise is that whenever it does, it will be worth opening.

Thank you for reading today’s note.

Research Disclaimers and Limitations

GrowthWaves and its author are not sponsored by or compensated by any company mentioned in this note. This is independent editorial analysis and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice. The author may have relationships with, work with, or hold equity in companies referenced; however, no content in this piece was influenced, commissioned, or incentivized by any such relationship. AI tools were used as a research assistant in the preparation of this piece. All claims are sourced and linked throughout.

Sources

Minuttia x Convex Works, "AI Search Visibility Data Study"

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