56% of Warehouse Automation Vendors
Aren't Cited
We asked ChatGPT and Claude the ten questions a VP of supply chain asks when evaluating automation solutions for their warehouse operations.
We scored the responses against 55 companies that we track doing $20M to $500M in annual revenue.
Read the full study, see the prompts we ran, and learn what the visible firms do differently.
Your supply chain audience is asking AI who they should call.
A distribution center operator starts an automation evaluation weeks before contacting a vendor, and that research now runs through AI search.
Most models commonly return the global players, despite a better option potentially sitting forty minutes from the facility.
If you are independent, in the $20M to $500M band, and selling to operations too small for Dematic, you might be missing an opportunity to be in the conversation.
Publishing more is not always the answer.
The highest-volume publishers in this category were not the most visible. The firms that surfaced in queries had more unique points of view in the market:
Expert-led pieces
With an engineer's name on them, saying something a competitor would argue with.
Original numbers
Figures only they had, because they ran the study or did the installs.
Detailed case studies
A named customer, real numbers, the constraint and what it cost.
Partner collaborations
Work made with a partner, an association or a customer.
Make your expertise visible
This type of content gets cited rather than scrolled past.
Every marketing leader we talk to in this category can describe what they should be publishing. The engineers have the data, sales has the objections, the founder has thirty years of pattern recognition. What is missing is capacity. Each of those pieces takes weeks, and none of it fits around a team of two already running the trade show calendar, the website and the sales collateral.
What is in the report.
All fourteen findings, including the three that made our own data look worse
The complete grid, every model and condition, with hit rates
All ten prompts, verbatim, so you can run the study yourself
The 24 companies a model actually named, and which conditions found them
The method and the limits, stated plainly enough to be argued with
Why the category has no ranked list a mid-market firm can appear on
Get the report.
Work email only. No calls unless you want one. You get the report, and a note when we publish the next study in the series.
Run the queries for your own company.
The report tells you what happened to 55 firms. It does not tell you what happens when a buyer asks about yours specifically.
Send us your category and your three closest competitors. We write the ten questions your buyer asks, run them across both models with different memory settings, three passes each, and send back every company named, where you did or did not appear, and the raw answers so you can check our work. One per company, we will respond within one business day.
Who this is for, and who it is not.
This is for you if you market for an independent or closely held automation firm between roughly $20M and $500M, your buyer runs a distribution center, a plant or a 3PL and you have the expertise in-house with no capacity to turn it into published work.
This is not for you if you are a division of a global strategic, just looking for a score, or you want the list of companies that were absent.
Questions we get about the study
Can I reproduce this?
Yes, all ten prompts are in the report with the exact model conditions. Run them and you will get a version of what we got, though not an identical one. That variance between runs is finding 3.
Is this an SEO service?
No. Traditional search ranking is a different problem with a different playbook. This is about whether a model names you when somebody asks it who to call.
Do buyers actually use AI to find vendors?
Some do but the share is hard to measure. AI tools send under 1% of visits to manufacturing sites, but a click count misses the buyer who reads an AI answer and then searches your name. Google's AI Overviews already appear on 57% of manufacturing searches. That's why we recommend work that pays off in search, sales and trade press, not AI tracking alone.
Our company was in the study. Where did we land?
Write to us and we will tell you exactly what we saw for your firm, across every run. We will not publish it, and we will not use your name in anything without written permission.
How long does this take to move?
Longer than most think since typical model citations can take months.Original research and a real collaboration are measured in weeks each, not days. Anyone promising a faster number is guessing.
Start with the report
Read what happened to 55 firms. Then, if you want to know what happens when a buyer asks about yours, request the assessment. Both are free.
