AI Visibility for Your Equity Story: What IR Teams Should Check
Investors increasingly research listed companies through AI tools. This guide covers the three questions every IR team should ask: which sources the models use, how far the answer can be steered, and what happens to the investor questions IR no longer sees.
In short
Investors and analysts increasingly research listed companies through AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, alongside the IR website. For an IR team this raises three questions that are rarely answered today: which sources the models actually use, whether you can steer what gets answered, and whether the questions investors ask are still visible to you. This guide walks through each question and the practical steps that follow, none of which require rebuilding your website.
Key facts
- You do not choose the sources a general model uses, and the citations investors see usually name third parties writing about you.
- Your site only enters the answer if the crawler can get to it, which is not guaranteed.
- Once investor research moves into general AI tools, IR loses the view of what is being asked.
- The fixes sit at infrastructure level and do not require rebuilding the site.
Institutional investors are already there. In Brunswick's 2026 survey of 100 US institutional active-equity investors, 54% rated GenAI as at least moderately important in their investment research. [1]
Which sources does a general AI actually draw on?
Sources you did not choose. The model works from whatever public material it can reach, and your own pages are one candidate among aggregators, reference sites, news and third-party commentary. Where those answers come from, and what a citation in one actually covers, is set out under when investors ask an AI about your company, where do the answers come from.
One part of it matters for everything below. Much of the time the summary is broadly accurate, and neither you nor the investor can verify where it came from. A listed issuer is held to information that is fair and accurate, and capable of being evidenced. An answer nobody can trace fails on the last of those.
Can you steer what a general AI answers about your company?
Not directly, and there is a technical layer beneath it that rarely reaches the IR team at all. On the open models you cannot edit how your story is summarised, and you cannot push an update the day you release results.
Beneath that sits a harder constraint: settings made for unrelated reasons can close your site to AI crawlers entirely, and when that happens your own pages never enter the answer, however clear the equity story on them is. Rendering does the same thing more quietly. When Vercel and MERJ measured crawler traffic across their network in December 2024, the OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Meta and ByteDance crawlers all fetched JavaScript files without running them; OpenAI's did so in about 11.5% of its requests. Google's Gemini and AppleBot were the exceptions. [2] A site that assembles its content in the browser shows the rest an empty shell. All of this comes before any content work, because content a crawler cannot reach might as well not exist.
Can you still see what the market is trying to work out?
Increasingly, no. The topics investors probe and where they hesitate used to reach IR through calls, emails and meetings, and once the research happens inside a general assistant that signal goes. What it costs, and how to get it back, is covered under what investors are asking about your company, and why IR stopped seeing it.
The reason it belongs in a guide about visibility is that the two losses arrive together. Sourcing is about what investors are told. Question visibility is about what you learn. The first is the one that usually gets noticed.
How do you check what AI can read on your site?
Most of it can be established in an afternoon, and none of it needs a developer sitting with you.
- Read your own robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for the AI agents by name. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended. Absence is not permission and presence is not a block; you are looking for what the file actually says about each one.
- Ask separately about the security layer. Bot protection and CDN rules sit in front of the site and can refuse a crawler that robots.txt welcomes. Nothing in the file will tell you. Only whoever administers that layer can.
- Look at the page without JavaScript. Disable it in your browser and reload an IR page, or view the raw source. Whatever is missing is roughly what the crawlers that do not render see.
- Put a question to an assistant about your own business and read the citations. The point is which sources it reached for and whether any of them are yours, not whether the answer was any good.
- Run the same question against two peers. The comparison tells you whether what you are seeing is your problem or the category's.
Read the results together rather than one at a time. If the agents are named and allowed in robots.txt but an assistant still cannot cite you, the block is almost certainly in the security layer, and that is a conversation with whoever administers it. If the page comes back empty with JavaScript disabled, the crawlers are being served nothing and no permission setting will change that. If both come back clean and the assistant still reaches for third parties, the access is fine and the question becomes what your pages actually say, which is the one case where content work is the right next step.
That is why the order matters. Run together, the checks tell you which of the two problems you have before anything is spent on the wrong one.
What can an IR team actually do about it?
Treat it as an infrastructure problem, not a content problem, because that is what it is, and it does not require rebuilding the website.
If the checks above show the crawlers are being turned away, that is a configuration job and an expert review of the site will scope it. The baseline comes first.
The second part is structural: give investors somewhere to ask that draws on your own record. That means a source-grounded assistant, confined to your published material with a reference behind each point. MIRA is one, and the mechanics sit under what is a source-grounded IR assistant. Because the questions then run through your own channel, the signal comes back to IR as well.
The bottom line
First impressions of a listed company are now formed inside AI tools, built from material the company did not choose, sometimes without the model reaching the company's own pages, and without IR ever seeing the questions. The response is infrastructural.
Most of it is not IR's to fix, and that is the useful part. Put one question to whoever owns your website, internal IT or an external agency: are the AI crawlers getting through to our IR pages today, and can you show me the evidence. IR does not need to answer that. IR needs a name against it and a date. Everything else, the peer comparison and the assistant on your own site, follows from what comes back.
MIRA is an investor relations assistant that answers investor questions from a company's own approved, published company information, part of the Finvictum group's tools for direct, compliant communication between companies and their investors. MIRA won Best New Digital Finance Product of the Year at the Digital Finance Awards Belgium 2026, judged by an independent jury and organised by FinTech Belgium. [3]
References
- 1.Brunswick Group, 2026 US Investor Survey. 100 US institutional active-equity investors, half long-only managers and half from hedge funds. Brunswick Review, 9 February 2026. review.brunswickgroup.com/article/investor-survey-2026
- 2.Vercel and MERJ, The Rise of the AI Crawler, 17 December 2024. Crawler requests measured across Vercel's network. vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler
- 3.FinTech Belgium, The Digital Finance Awards Belgium 2026 Celebrates the Best and Brightest in Digital Finance, Ghent, 23 June 2026. fintechbelgium.be/news
See where the answer stops. Book a MIRA demo on your own published documents, and we will show you the questions it declines as readily as the ones it answers.
About the author: Sander van Prooijen is Head of Commercial Strategy at Finvictum, where he leads the European rollout of MIRA and works with listed companies on AI-era investor communication. Connect on LinkedIn.