The Research Behind the Rankings
Across 20,000+ multi-turn probes covering 200+ brands, AIVO Standard's working papers currently measure an 87.3% Linkage Gap: brands that large language models cite as known are, at that same rate, not the brands those models go on to recommend at the moment of decision. The object of study is not AI visibility. It is AI-mediated choice, what happens in the space between a model recognizing a brand and a model recommending it. Being remembered and being chosen are turning out to be two different events, governed by different mechanics, and most of the industry is still only measuring the first.
That distinction is the reason AIVO Standard exists as a research body before AIVO Meridian exists as a product. The 87.3% figure did not come from a product demo. It came from DOI-anchored working papers published on Zenodo. A DOI does not make a finding true; it makes the work persistent, identifiable, and independently citable, so the methodology and the evidence have to carry the rest. Meridian's AI Rankings, its ARQ scores, its Reasoning Chain and AI Win-Rate metrics, all of it sits downstream of that research program, not alongside it.
AIVO Standard is the research institution: currently 85+ working papers and 300+ Journal articles, DOI-anchored rather than peer-reviewed, growing independently of any single product cycle. AIVO Meridian is its commercial implementation, the instrument that turns that research into rankings, audits, and recurring monitoring. The second only works because the first is rigorous.
The practical effect for readers of this Journal is a sharper editorial line going forward. Findings will continue to be published here first, in full, before any commercial framing is attached to them. When a working paper documents something like the Silvercar anomaly, a brand still recommended above live competitors more than a year after ceasing to exist, that finding stands on its own as a piece of research into how these systems fail, independent of what any AIVO product does with it afterward. The research comes first. The product is what makes the research usable at scale, not what makes it true.
AIVO Standard will keep publishing the working papers that make findings like the Linkage Gap and the Silvercar anomaly possible in the first place. AIVO Meridian will keep turning those papers into rankings and monitoring that brands and enterprises can act on. Readers should expect that order, standard first, product second, to hold across everything that follows from here.
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