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August 2026 edition

The Australian
Discovery Index

Category leaders are found everywhere customers search. Ranking in Google, named in AI answers, discovered in social, searched for by name. We score all four.

17,158
brands recorded
59
live boards
Monthly
recalculated
Measured across
Google AI Overviews ChatGPT Gemini Claude Perplexity Copilot TikTok Instagram YouTube Reddit

The finding

Owning Google is not the same as being recommended.

Categories

Browse the index.

Australian categories scored nationally. Pick one to see who leads, and how far ahead they are.

Not seeing yours? Nominate a category .

Method

Four channels, one number.

Each channel is scored out of 100 against the set below, on its own terms, then combined on fixed weights. Nothing in this edition passes 76 and nothing realistically will: a brand would have to lead every channel at once.

Every board, every edition, same set

45% 30% 15% 10%
45% Organic search
Google AI Overviews

9 category keywords per board, position weighted

30% AI answers
ChatGPT Gemini Claude Perplexity Copilot AI Mode

25 questions put to 7 engines, scored on who gets named

15% Social search
TikTok Instagram YouTube Reddit

Searches run inside each platform, not on the open web

10% Brand demand

Monthly Australian search volume for the brand name and its close variants

Worked example Carsales, ranked first on car listing platforms
75.5 of 100
Carsales scores 75.5

Four channels, each scored out of 100 on its own terms, then weighted and added. The dotted arc is the headroom nobody in the index has taken.

Search discoverability +35.0 77.8 scored × 45% AI visibility +22.0 73.3 scored × 30% Social discoverability +10.5 70.2 scored × 15% Brand demand +8.0 80.0 scored × 10%

Add the four contributions together and you have the presence score. A brand strong on one channel only cannot climb far, which is the point. Where a channel could not be measured its weight is shared across the rest rather than counted as zero, so the percentages here always total 100. Contributions are rounded to one decimal place.

Read the full method

Questions

What brands ask us first.

My brand is not on a board. Why?

Nobody picks the list. Every brand here was named in an AI answer, cited as a source, or ranks for one of the category's buying terms, and a chosen list can only report how the chosen brands did, so it can never surface a challenger. If your category is not listed yet, ask for it below. If it is listed and you are not in the table, you were not returned for any of its keywords, named in any engine answer, or surfaced in any social search.

Can we pay to be included, or to move up?

No. There is no paid placement, no submission fee and no way to influence a score. The method is published and it is the same for every brand on the board, including the ones who are clients and the ones who are not.

Why is a review site ranked against brands?

Because it is genuinely what gets found. Publishers, marketplaces and comparison sites often outrank the brands they write about, and assistants quote them. We label what each entity is and leave it in the table. Filtering them out would delete the finding.

A channel shows n/m instead of a score. Is that a zero?

No. It means we could not measure that channel for that brand this edition, which is not the same as scoring nothing on it. The remaining channels carry the score, and the brand's own panel says so.

Why do some rows show a dash for movement?

Because that board has nothing yet to move against, and we would rather show a dash than print an arrow we cannot stand behind. Movement is a property of the whole field rather than of one row: it needs a previous edition of the same board, scored on the same weights, to rank against. A board gets it on its second edition on the current methodology, so it arrives board by board rather than everywhere at once .

Can we see the data behind our own row?

Yes. Any brand on a board can ask for the keyword set, the engine answers and the social queries its own score was built from. An index that will not show its working to the brands it ranks is just an opinion with a table around it.

Read the full method

Not on the index

Ask for your category.

Categories are added, not brands. Every brand in one gets scored at the same time, on the same keyword set, whether they asked for it or not. Nothing here is for sale.