Loyalty does not start at the second purchase. It starts the moment a customer asks where to buy and your business is the one named. My September column for the Forbes Business Council is about the mistakes that quietly take you out of that moment.
- The column: Brand Visibility Mistakes That Can Erode Customer Loyalty, Forbes Business Council, September 11, 2026.
- The mistake nobody sees is the one the AI assistant sees first: a site built for human eyes that a machine cannot read, follow, or quote.
- In the Visibility Mesh benchmark of 746 live websites on September 16, 2026, 67% scored below 50 out of 100 for AI legibility and none had reached the top band.
- Every mistake in the column maps to one of five questions an assistant works through before it recommends a business. You can check all five on your own site in two minutes.
What the column argues
Customers now ask an assistant before they search, and the assistant recommends what it can read, trust, and quote. A brand that is inconsistent across surfaces, thin where it matters, or unreadable to machines is not disliked. It is skipped. Skipping is silent, and silence is why the loss shows up as churn rather than as a complaint.
The column walks through the mistakes I see most: identity that changes from page to page, claims that live in marketing prose instead of in fields a machine can parse, pages that answer nothing directly, trust signals that exist but are not connected to the brand entity, and structure that leaves an assistant unable to follow who you are. Read it in full on Forbes.
The numbers behind it
The column draws on our living benchmark. As of September 16, 2026, it holds 746 websites scored on the current methodology, ecommerce and not. The median score is 43.8. Two thirds sit below 50. The highest any site has reached is 71.5, and the Leading band starts at 80. Our State of AI Visibility 2026 study found the same pattern on 216 Shopify storefronts. The median was 46, and only 27 stores, one in eight, were fully legible to AI.
These are not bad businesses. Many have excellent products and loyal customers. They are simply invisible to the system their next customer is asking.
How to see the mistakes on your own site
Each mistake in the column is one of the five questions we score. Can AI find you. Can AI read you. Can AI follow you. Can AI quote you. Does AI trust you. A free scan reads five of your pages the way an assistant does and returns a real scorecard on all five, with the first fixes in order. If you would rather check by hand first, this guide walks through it.
Next in the column series: Before You Buy More Traffic, Fix the Proof, my September 23 column, and the four question test you can run on your own website.
FAQ
Is this about SEO?
Partly. Search engines and AI assistants read the same page, but assistants need explicit identity, structured claims, and quotable answers more than keywords. A page can rank and still never be recommended.
Which mistake costs the most?
Inconsistent identity. If your name, address, products, and claims differ across your site and the places that mention you, an assistant has conflicting facts to choose from, and it may describe you wrongly or not at all.
How often should a brand check this?
Monthly. A theme update, a new app, or an edited template can undo readability without anyone noticing, and nothing inside your platform tells you it happened.
Run a free scan and get a real scorecard across the five questions, with the first fixes in order. No install, no call. Run the free scan