I pre-registered a study on AI visibility signals. The main result was null.

Originally published on angeo.dev . Full tables, p-values and the sealed plan are there. Most claims about AI visibility are untestable by design: publish the signals, wait, attribute anything good that happens to the signals. I wanted a version I could not fudge, so I wrote the analysis plan first, hashed it, and sent the hash to the other party before I had any data. The question Do businesses AI assistants name repeatedly differ, on observable technical signals, from businesses the same assistants name once ? Every business in the corpus was named at least once, so this says nothing about how to enter an answer. It compares repeat against one-off mentions inside a named-business corpus. Four signals, all externally observable: Signal Check Crawler access Does robots.txt block any of 8 AI crawlers Content map Does the site serve /llms.txt Structured data Does a product page emit JSON-LD Product Buyability Does that node carry offers.availability Study setup The answers came from a partner (connexion.me), who ran 44 product-level home-decor buying questions across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, twice, in two arms — 264 answers per arm. Blinding was deliberate. I did not write the questions and did not see their store list until my plan was sealed; they never saw my frame, my scan results or my thresholds. Roster rows 669 no resolvable domain -186 resolved to a different company -3 marketplaces and listing surfaces -12 duplicate rows collapsed -10 Unique domains analysed 458 scanned successfully 455 Cases: 3+ mentions across both runs and present in both. Controls: exactly one mention across both runs. Head excluded first — anything in 53+ of 264 answers (Amazon, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Home Depot). The pre-registration Sealed 10 August, SHA-256 9b4ccf12629e… : Under 15% of named businesses would be Magento No signal would separate the groups by more than 15 points Refutation condition: any signal differing by 20+ points with the named group higher Result — generic