Why it matters
Most industrial distributors are entirely absent from AI answers in their category today, while Grainger, Zoro, or Amazon Business get named by default. Measuring AI visibility is the wake-up call — it shows exactly which buyer questions surface a competitor instead of you.
In practice
A hydraulics distributor that stocks Parker and Eaton cross-references wants to know whether it surfaces when a maintenance engineer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity 'what's a replacement for a discontinued Parker hydraulic fitting.' AI-visibility tools such as Profound, Otterly, and Ahrefs Brand Radar run buyer prompts like that on a schedule and report the distributor's mention rate and citation share versus competitors — a number that often moves independently of where the same pages rank in classic Google results.