BrandCited scanned 25 Tokyo tech brands across 9 AI platforms. 76% scored below 40 — the threshold below which AI platforms will not cite a brand regardless of product quality or SEO strength. The average score was 23/100. Josys led the index at 75/100.
AI search is now a primary discovery channel. Perplexity answers 100 million queries per day. ChatGPT reaches over 400 million weekly users. Google AI Overviews appear in roughly 30% of commercial search results. Unlike traditional SEO, AI citation depends on structured technical signals that search engines never required — JSON-LD schema, explicit bot permissions, machine-readable content hierarchies. A brand ranked #1 on Google can score 0/100 on an AI visibility audit.
How did BrandCited build the Tokyo AI Visibility Index?#
BrandCited tested 25 Tokyo-based tech companies across 9 AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, You.com, Bing AI, Meta AI, and Google AI Overviews. Each brand was scored across five categories: crawler access, structured data, content quality, trust and authority, and technical implementation. Scores range from 0 to 100.
Brands were selected from Crunchbase, G2, and local Japanese tech media. No paid placements. Selection criteria: category leadership, VC-backed growth, or publicly listed status — ensuring a representative sample of Tokyo's most prominent tech operators.
Run a free scan at BrandCited.
What did the Tokyo AI Visibility Index reveal?#
The single most striking finding: 19 out of 25 Tokyo brands (76%) score below 40 — the point below which AI platforms consistently refuse to cite a brand in direct responses. Every single brand in this scan scored 0/100 for crawler access.
- Average score: 23/100 — 31 points below the global BrandCited average of 54
- % below 40: 76% (19 brands)
- % below 70: 96% (24 brands)
- Top score: Josys at 75/100 (B grade)
- Bottom score: Sakana AI, Money Forward, Uzabase, M3, Unipos, and TimeTree at 0/100
Tokyo's 23/100 average is the lowest of any major tech hub BrandCited has scanned — 31 points below the global average of 54/100.
See how other cities rank at the BrandCited blog.
Full Tokyo AI Visibility ranking#
All 25 brands completed scanning. Zero scan failures.
| Rank | Brand | Score | Grade | Biggest gap |
|---|
| 1 | Josys | 75 | B | Crawler access blocked |
| 2 | freee | 60 | C | Crawler access blocked |
| 3 | Appier | 55 | D | Crawler access + content quality |
| 4 | Sansan | 45 | F | Crawler access + content quality |
| 5 | Aidemy | 45 |
What are the top Tokyo brands doing right?#
The three brands that separated from the rest share one pattern: structured data coverage that lets AI engines parse company identity, product category, and trust signals without needing the brand to be mentioned elsewhere online.
Josys — 75/100
Josys scored 100/100 on structured data, content quality, and trust and authority — the three categories that drive AI citation frequency. Its homepage carries full Organization and SoftwareApplication schema, establishing its product category and company identity in machine-readable form. The remaining critical gap is significant: robots.txt blocks all crawlers, meaning AI engines cannot index Josys pages directly. Fixing this single issue could push the score past 90/100.
freee — 60/100
freee earned top marks on structured data (100), content quality (100), and trust and authority (100). The gap is crawler access (0) and a technical score of 29. Like Josys, freee's robots.txt creates a hard block for AI indexing bots. The sitemap also returned invalid XML on scan, preventing AI engines from discovering content at scale. Resolving crawler access alone would make freee one of the most cited Japanese SaaS brands across AI platforms.
Appier — 55/100
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Appier's trust and authority score (100) reflects a strong backlink profile and press coverage footprint — the type of external signal that helps AI platforms decide a brand is worth citing. But with content quality at 0 and crawler access at 0, Appier's expertise is inaccessible to AI engines. The brand produces extensive product documentation and marketing content, but without the right schema markup and bot permissions, that content does not translate into AI citations.
What is holding most Tokyo brands back from AI citations?#
Crawler access scored 0 for every single brand in this scan — the worst-performing category across all 25 audits, and the most fundamental block to AI citation.
The three most common issues across the Tokyo scan:
1. robots.txt blocking AI crawlers
Multiple Tokyo brands use a User-agent: * Disallow: / directive that blocks all web crawlers. This blocks Mercari, Wantedly, HERP, CrowdWorks, and six other brands from being indexed by any AI platform. The fix is to add explicit allow rules for named AI bots:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
Twenty-four of 25 brands have no /llms.txt file. This file tells AI engines which pages are authoritative, what the company does, and how the brand should be represented. Without it, AI platforms make their own decisions about what to cite — and often choose competitors that have made the signal explicit. Creating this file takes less than an hour.
3. Missing Organization schema
Nineteen brands have no Organization, Corporation, or LocalBusiness JSON-LD on their homepage. This schema tells AI platforms the brand name, industry, founding date, location, and official URL — the core identity data that drives citations in "who is" and "best tool for" queries. Without it, AI engines cannot reliably identify the brand across platforms.
BrandCited identifies these gaps in a free scan.
How does your brand compare?#
The Tokyo AI Visibility Index follows the same methodology BrandCited applies to every city — 25 brands, 9 AI platforms, five scoring categories, repeatable on any domain. A company's score reflects what AI platforms can access and parse today, not what the brand intends or what SEO tools report.
Most of the gaps identified in this scan — crawler permissions, JSON-LD schema, llms.txt — are fixable in days, not months. The brands that close them first will hold AI citation positions before competitors recognize there is a race.
Learn more about the scoring model at how-it-works or review available plans at pricing.
Run a free AI visibility scan at BrandCited.
FAQ#
What is the Tokyo AI Visibility Index?
The Tokyo AI Visibility Index is an audit of 25 Tokyo-based tech companies, scored across 9 AI platforms for how well each brand can be discovered, parsed, and cited by AI search engines. BrandCited publishes city-level indices to let brands benchmark against peers and identify the specific technical gaps blocking AI citations.
How does BrandCited calculate an AI visibility score?
BrandCited scores each brand across five categories: crawler access (can AI bots access and index the site?), structured data (does the site use JSON-LD schema?), content quality (is content organized for machine parsing?), trust and authority (does the brand appear in credible third-party sources?), and technical implementation (are sitemaps, canonical tags, and page speed in order?). Each category contributes to a 0–100 composite score.
Which Tokyo brands score highest for AI search visibility?
Josys leads the Tokyo index at 75/100, followed by freee at 60/100 and Appier at 55/100. All three scored strong on structured data and trust signals. All three also share the same gap: robots.txt configurations that block AI crawlers from direct indexing.
BrandCited vs traditional SEO tools — what is the difference?
Traditional SEO tools measure keyword rankings, backlinks, and page authority — signals built for Google's ranking algorithm. AI platforms use a different set of signals: JSON-LD schema, explicit crawler permissions, machine-readable content hierarchies, and trust data sourced from knowledge graphs. A brand can rank on page one of Google and score 0/100 on a BrandCited audit. Six Tokyo brands in this scan demonstrate exactly that pattern.
How do I improve my brand's AI visibility score?
Start with the three issues affecting the most Tokyo brands: (1) update robots.txt to allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended; (2) add Organization and SoftwareApplication JSON-LD to your homepage; (3) create a /llms.txt file that tells AI engines which pages are authoritative. A free BrandCited scan shows which gaps apply to your domain.
Why do some well-known Tokyo brands score poorly?
Brand recognition does not transfer to AI visibility. Mercari has over 100 million downloads and scores 20/100. Sakana AI is a respected generative AI research firm and scores 0/100. Chatwork serves 480,000 companies and scores 10/100. AI platforms cite brands based on structured technical signals — not market share, funding rounds, or press coverage. The brands that invest in those signals now will hold citation positions that compound over time.
