The test.
Every wave of this index so far picked a sector. Automakers. Insurers. Chemicals. Industrial equipment. A clean cluster, a clean story. Wave 11 had no clean cluster left.
What remained were three brand-owned names that had never been scored, and that refuse to sit in one sector: Continental, a tire maker and automotive-technology supplier. Daimler Truck, the maker of the Mercedes-Benz Trucks Actros. SAP, Europe's largest software company. There is no sector article to write about those three. So we wrote the other article. The one about what they have in common.
We asked each brand's buyer the question they actually ask, one frozen task per brand, public, locked before measurement. 18 datapoints per brand across OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic, in German [S1]. The task slate is set by the public Task Selection rule [S4].
- Continental — a car owner picks a premium 225/45 R17 summer tire. Close: the order at a tire retailer.
- Daimler Truck — a fleet manager sources a long-haul tractor. Close: a fleet quote through the dealer network.
- SAP — an IT lead chooses a mid-market cloud ERP. Close: a multi-year project through an implementation partner.
One caveat, stated once for all three. Single task per brand, three-provider track, and AI Usability this wave is a structurally derived interim value, not a fleet-measured profile; the fleet enrichment lands in Wave 11b. The read is directional, Confidence C [S1].
The brand owns the story. The channel owns the close. Three industries, no exception.
Continental comes up for tires. The retailer that fits them takes the order.
Ask an agent for a premium 225/45 R17 summer tire, and Continental is on the list. Next to Michelin and Bridgestone, where it belongs. AI Visibility 26.4 [S1]. No surprise: Continental is one of the most recognised tire brands in Europe.
The PremiumContact story holds. The spec is on continental-tires.com. The tire finder is there. The size and vehicle fitment guidance is there. A buyer who clicks through gets the right tire for the car.
What is not on continental-tires.com: a checkout.
Because there isn't one. Continental does not sell the tire to the driver. The order closes at the retailers and comparison portals: Tirendo, Euromaster, A.T.U, Reifen.de [S3]. Between them they hold the inventory, the price, the fitting appointment. Continental makes the tire. The channel makes the sale.
The agent reaches the right Continental tire, then hands the buyer to a portal to actually order it. The brand surfaced the product and lost the transaction. One boundary worth naming, because the agent has to get it right: Continental is becoming a pure-play tire company. The automotive-electronics business listed separately as Aumovio in September 2025, and ContiTech is up for sale [S3]. The tire surface measured here is the core of the company, and an agent still reading the old conglomerate is answering about a company that no longer exists.
The tire is visible. The retailer that puts it on the car is one click past the brand.
Score: AI Visibility 26.4 · AI Usability ~34 (structural interim) · Composite 3.6 / 10 [S1].
Ask AI for a truck. You might get a car.
Daimler Truck is a global commercial-vehicle leader. The Mercedes-Benz Trucks Actros is the long-haul tractor at the centre of European fleet procurement. Ask for a long-haul tractor with low total cost of ownership, and the Actros is on the shortlist next to Volvo FH and MAN TGX. AI Visibility 21.4 [S1].
This brand carries a risk the others do not. A name it shares with a sibling.
In 2021, Daimler split into two listed companies. Mercedes-Benz Group AG makes passenger cars. Daimler Truck Holding AG makes trucks, under the Mercedes-Benz Trucks brand [S3]. Both are in the DAX. Both answer to "Mercedes-Benz." An agent that resolves a truck query to the car company has not made a near miss. It has reached the wrong company.
Past the name, the same pattern as Continental. The Actros spec and the configurator are on mercedes-benz-trucks.com. The fleet order is not. It closes through the Mercedes-Benz truck dealer network and the fleet-leasing firms that write the quote, structure the financing, and own the service contract [S3]. Daimler Truck makes the truck. The dealer makes the fleet deal.
And within the truck line, the spec still has to land. The Actros L is the long-haul flagship. Atego is distribution. Arocs is construction. eActros is battery-electric. A fleet manager who asked for long-haul and got Atego got the wrong truck.
Two DAX companies answer to one name. The agent has to pick the right one before the quote even starts.
Score: AI Visibility 21.4 · AI Usability ~30 (structural interim) · Composite 3.2 / 10 [S1].
SAP comes up for ERP. The partner that installs it owns the deal.
SAP is Europe's largest software company. Ask for a mid-market cloud ERP, and SAP S/4HANA is on the shortlist next to Oracle and Microsoft. AI Visibility 29.4 [S1]. The most intermediated brand in this wave, and the cleanest version of the pattern.
The S/4HANA Cloud story is on sap.com. The editions split, the industry solutions, the demo request. A buyer who clicks through gets the platform argument.
What is not on sap.com: a way to buy.
Enterprise software has no self-service checkout. The ERP decision is a multi-year project, and it runs through a system integrator. Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, PwC, and the wider SAP partner ecosystem [S3]. The partner runs the demo, scopes the implementation, writes the statement of work, and owns the contract. SAP builds the platform. The integrator runs the deal, end to end. The buyer never transacts with SAP at all.
There is a second trap, the same shape as the Daimler one. SAP sells more than ERP. An ERP query that lands on SuccessFactors reached the HR product. One that lands on Ariba reached procurement. And a mid-market query that lands on Business One reached the small-business tier, not S/4HANA Cloud. Right brand, wrong product, lost deal.
The platform is visible. The partner that turns it into a contract is the whole transaction.
Score: AI Visibility 29.4 · AI Usability ~30 (structural interim) · Composite 3.3 / 10 [S1].
Three industries, one architecture: the census is complete.
Tires, trucks, enterprise software. A consumer impulse buy, a seven-figure fleet decision, a multi-year software project. Nothing about the products is alike.
The architecture is identical.
The brand surfaces in the AI answer. The brand page carries the spec, the differentiator, the story. The brand is findable. The close, the order, the contract, sits one layer down, with a retailer, a dealer, or a system integrator who turns a brand on a shortlist into a transaction. The score measures the first layer. The revenue lives in the second.
That is not a Wave 11 finding. It is the finding of the whole index, stated one more time by the three brands least likely to share anything. Insurers route through Check24. Automakers route through marketplaces. Industrial OEMs route through EPCs and engineering firms. And now: tires through retailers, trucks through dealers, software through integrators. The channel is the layer that does not get cited.
With these three, the index closes its first full pass. Every brand-owned name it tracks has been run through the Commerce lane and given a measured AI Visibility score [S2]. The question that opened the index, "is the brand even in the answer," has been asked of the entire field.
The census asked one question of forty brands. The answer was almost always the same: found, but not yet buyable.
So the next question is the one the score cannot answer alone. Not whether the brand is found, but whether the agent can act once it arrives. A channel an agent can see and a next step it can take, named on the brand's own surface, separate the brand an agent recommends as a buyable answer from the one it merely cites: the retailer, the dealer, the partner, made visible before the shortlist hardens around someone else [S4].
