How B2B brands show up to buyers and AI

The TOM Index is an editorially independent ranking of B2B brand visibility, published with research and methodology by StudioNorth. It measures how clearly brands show up to the two audiences that now form shortlists: the buyers who remember and trust them, and the AI systems that surface, summarize and compare them. Rankings are published by category, every brand that appears receives a TOM Score, and the Index is free to read at TOMIndex.com.

TOM stands for Top of Mind and Top of Model. Top of Mind is how clearly a brand lives in buyer memory, category conversations, peer validation and public market signals. Top of Model is how accurately AI systems surface, place, summarize and compare that brand inside buying-context prompts.

A TOM Score is the composite of these two underlying scores, each on a 100-point scale:

• The Audience Visibility Score (Top of Mind) measures Distinctiveness, Clarity, Confidence, Distinctiveness, Trust, and Resonance.
• The LLM Visibility Score (Top of Model) measures Category Discovery, Executive Voice, and Persona Discovery.

The two are averaged into the composite shown in the ranking, always within a defined category, and every category page shows all three numbers.

The current research runs hundreds of buying-context prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Prompts are written the way a buyer actually asks: who leads a category, who fits a specific role and situation, how two brands compare. Those findings are combined with publicly verifiable market signals to produce each brand's Top of Model score.

No. No brand can pay to be included, moved up or taken off, and no entry is edited on request. StudioNorth applies the same method to client and non-client brands, and the TOM Index is published as an editorially independent property. The only route to a higher TOM Score is to be more clearly recognized by buyers and more accurately represented by AI systems.

Because the TOM Index reports what the AI systems discovered, unedited. Models do not hold one clean record of a brand; they hold every version of the name in circulation, each with its own share of voice, presence and resonance, and each is scored as surfaced. Models also treat research bodies, standards frameworks, agencies, analyst firms and open-source tools as authorities inside a category conversation, so those names surface alongside vendors, often with very high Top of Model scores.

Nothing is merged, corrected, moved or filtered, because a buyer asking the same question sees the same result, and editing the ranking would misstate that. Each category page explains the specific names in its ranking.

It means the AI systems did not surface your brand in the buying-context prompts run for that category in the current cycle. That is a visibility signal, and the one most worth acting on, because it is where a shortlist forms without you. To find out why, request a Brand Visibility Audit from StudioNorth. The Audit applies the same Top of Mind and Top of Model methodology to your company in the context of its competitors, assesses why you are not showing up, and provides an action plan to correct it.

The TOM Index ranks the category and is free to read. The TOM Score Snapshot is for a specific brand that appears in the category: a free breakdown of the eight signals behind the brand’s two scores, alongside the same breakdown for the category's top three. The Brand Visibility Audit is a StudioNorth engagement for brands that want more than a score: brands not yet showing up, and brands on the list that want deeper insight into their visibility and an action plan to improve it.