We Ran an AI Visibility Audit on Our Own Product. Here's What We Found.

We sell AI visibility audits. So we ran one on ourselves.

HireDepth is our AI psychometric tool for executive search firms. It scores candidates on leadership traits, team fit, and cognitive style. We built it because psychometric testing in exec search is stuck in the 1990s. But the product question we wanted to answer was simpler: when a hiring partner asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “what’s the best psychometric tool for executive hiring?”, does HireDepth show up?

The answer: no. Not once, across 18 queries and 4 AI models.

The test setup

We tested 18 buyer-intent queries across ChatGPT (GPT-4o), Claude (3.5 Sonnet), Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Perplexity. The queries covered every angle a potential buyer might search from:

• “best psychometric assessment for executive hiring”
• “AI-powered personality tests for leadership roles”
• “psychometric tools for C-suite recruitment”
• “alternative to SHL for executive search”
• “personality assessment API for recruitment platforms”
• “psychometric software for headhunters”
• “leadership assessment tools for board appointments”
• “AI personality profiling for senior hires”
• “cognitive assessment platform for executive recruiters”
• “team fit scoring tools for leadership recruitment”
• “psychometric test providers UK”
• “best assessment tools for retained search firms”
• “automated candidate personality assessment”

And 5 more variations covering integration-specific and pricing-related intents.

That is 18 queries multiplied by 4 models. 72 opportunities for HireDepth to appear.

The results

Every single response recommended at least one of our competitors. Most recommended three or four. HireDepth appeared in none.

Here is a sample of what came back:

Query	ChatGPT	Claude	Gemini	Perplexity
Best psychometric for exec hiring	Thomas Intl, Hogan, SHL	Hogan, SHL, Criteria Corp	Thomas Intl, Hogan, SHL	Thomas Intl, Hogan, Criteria Corp
AI personality tests for leadership	Criteria Corp, Predictive Index	Thomas Intl, Criteria Corp	SHL, Predictive Index	Criteria Corp, Thomas Intl
Psychometric tools for C-suite	Hogan, Thomas Intl	Hogan, SHL, Thomas Intl	Hogan, Thomas Intl, SHL	Hogan, Thomas Intl, SHL
Alternative to SHL for exec search	Thomas Intl, Hogan, Criteria Corp	Thomas Intl, Hogan, Predictive Index	Criteria Corp, Hogan	Thomas Intl, Criteria Corp, Hogan
Personality assessment API	Criteria Corp, Thomas Intl	Criteria Corp, Predictive Index	Criteria Corp, Thomas Intl	Criteria Corp, SHL
Assessment tools for retained search	Hogan, SHL, Thomas Intl	Hogan, Thomas Intl	SHL, Hogan, Thomas Intl	Hogan, SHL, Thomas Intl
Cognitive assessment for exec recruiters	Thomas Intl, Criteria Corp	Hogan, Criteria Corp, SHL	Thomas Intl, Hogan	Criteria Corp, Hogan, Thomas Intl
Team fit scoring for leadership	Predictive Index, Thomas Intl	Predictive Index, Criteria Corp	Thomas Intl, Predictive Index	Predictive Index, Thomas Intl, Criteria Corp

Thomas International showed up in 27 of 72 responses. Hogan appeared in 24. SHL in 19. Criteria Corp in 22. Predictive Index in 11.

HireDepth: zero.

Why they win, we don’t

This is not about company size. Criteria Corp is not a household name. Predictive Index is mid-market. The pattern across all five competitors is structural, not reputational.

The competitors that dominate AI citations share five traits:

1. Structured documentation with question-framed headers. Thomas International’s docs answer “How do I assess leadership potential?” directly. AI models extract that format easily.

2. Wikipedia articles. SHL and Thomas International both have Wikipedia pages. These are high-trust training data sources for every major model.

3. Integration docs with code examples. Criteria Corp publishes full API documentation with copy-pasteable code snippets. When someone asks about “personality assessment API”, Criteria Corp’s docs are exactly what the model trained on.

4. Published research papers. Hogan has decades of peer-reviewed research on personality assessment validity. Academic papers are heavily weighted in training data.

5. Product comparison pages. Multiple competitors publish explicit “Us vs. SHL” or “Us vs. Hogan” comparison pages. These pages directly match “alternative to X” queries.

HireDepth has none of these. Our product pages describe features but don’t answer buyer questions. No llms.txt file. No API documentation published externally. No structured knowledge base. No comparison content.

We built a good product and forgot to make it legible to the systems people actually use to find products.

The fix: what we’re doing about it

We are treating this as a five-stage project, each step building on the last:

Steps 1 and 2 are already underway. We expect to rerun the full audit in 90 days and publish the results.

The uncomfortable truth is that product quality alone does not determine who AI models recommend. Documentation structure, content format, and third-party signals do. We built BriefingHQ because we saw this gap firsthand. HireDepth was the proof.