Scaleup AI Visibility Index: Slush 2026 Edition

Generate More is a Helsinki-based AEO and AI SEO agency for Nordic and international tech companies, founded by Lari Numminen. The Scaleup AI Visibility Index ranks companies by how often AI answer engines cite their website. This edition covers the 61 scaleups whose founders or executives speak at Slush 2026. The data was collected on 26 October 2026.

Most AI-visible scaleups at Slush 2026

GetYourGuide, OpenAI and Natural Cycles lead the Scaleup AI Visibility Index for Slush 2026, and together they hold 78% of all AI citations in the index. The median scaleup had 175 citations on 26 October 2026.

Three findings stand out:

• Google's AI Overviews supply most of the volume. 76% of all citations in this index came from AI Overviews, which is why consumer brands with large search demand, such as GetYourGuide, rank so high.
• ChatGPT is far more selective. 17 of the 61 scaleups had no ChatGPT citation at all, and OpenAI alone accounted for 62% of the ChatGPT citations in the index.
• Visibility moved quickly in four months. 38 scaleups gained citations after 1 July 2026 and 21 lost them. OpenAI went from 54,072 to 146,675, and ElevenLabs from 16,410 to 55,575.

About Slush and why we built this edition

Slush is a not-for-profit startup event that began in Helsinki in 2008 as a 250-person gathering, and it is still organized by students and recent graduates, according to Slush. The 2026 main event takes place on 18–19 November at Messukeskus, the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre, with Investor Day at Finlandia Hall on 17 November (event information).

The Scaleup index uses the published Slush 2026 speaker lineup (page 1, page 2), which lists 187 speakers. We kept the companies the speakers represent that have raised a Series B or later, or at least $50 million in total. Investors, media, public bodies, listed companies and holding groups are left out.

Generate More is a Helsinki company, and Lari Numminen will be at Slush 2026 on 18–19 November. We built this edition so that founders, investors and marketers at the event share one checkable picture of which companies AI answer engines already know. If you see the QR code on Lari's hoodie, it leads to generatemore.ai/visibility, where you can find all three Slush 2026 indexes.

Why AI citations matter

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google which companies lead a category, the answer is written from sources the AI can find and link to. A cited page shapes the description, and the company behind it gets a click path back to its own story. For a scaleup, that matters most where buyers, candidates and investors form a shortlist before they ever visit a website.

Citation counts do not prove that AI recommends a company, and they say nothing about revenue. They do show whose website the engines are reading, which is the part of AI visibility a company controls most directly.

Full ranking

Biggest changes since July

The index total moved from 792,689 citations on 1 July 2026 to 827,170 on 26 October 2026.

Largest gains

• OpenAI: 54,072 on 1 July, 146,675 on 26 October
• ElevenLabs: 16,410 on 1 July, 55,575 on 26 October
• Gamma: 20,144 on 1 July, 34,967 on 26 October
• Whatnot: 3,368 on 1 July, 7,928 on 26 October
• Anthropic: 2,911 on 1 July, 6,799 on 26 October

Largest losses

• GetYourGuide: 511,836 on 1 July, 426,956 on 26 October
• Natural Cycles: 83,614 on 1 July, 69,724 on 26 October
• Remote: 19,445 on 1 July, 7,158 on 26 October
• Lovable: 11,662 on 1 July, 7,187 on 26 October

What it means for scaleups

The gap between the top of this list and the median is enormous, and most of it comes from Google. Brands that people already search for get pulled into AI Overviews by sheer demand. ChatGPT draws on a narrower set of sources, and for 17 companies on this list it found nothing worth linking to on their own site.

For a scaleup selling to businesses, the ChatGPT and Perplexity columns are the better guide. They show whether your own pages are the ones these engines read when someone asks about your category, and a low count there is something your content team can change.

Method

Sample. Companies represented by speakers in the Slush 2026 lineup that have raised a Series B or later, or at least $50 million. Funding stage comes from public announcements and press coverage.

Data. For each company website we pulled the number of times AI answers cite the domain, including subdomains, from the Ahrefs API (Site Explorer, AI responses) on 26 October 2026. The score adds up citations in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Grok. Google AI Overviews includes both of Ahrefs' AI Overview datasets, one built from prompts and one from keywords. Google AI Mode is left out, because the API reports a smaller AI Mode figure than the Ahrefs web app does. We ran the same query for 1 July 2026 to measure the change.

Ranking. Companies are ranked by total citations within their own index. Companies with the same total share a rank, and the table lists them alphabetically. Companies without a public website have no score and are listed after the table.

What this index does not show

• Mentions without a link. An answer that names a company without citing its website does not count.
• The prompts behind the numbers. Ahrefs runs its own prompt set, so the score reflects that set and not the questions your buyers ask.
• Whether the description is accurate. A citation can come with an outdated or wrong summary of what the company does.
• Commercial impact. Citations are a visibility signal, and we make no claim about pipeline or revenue.

All Slush 2026 indexes

This edition is one of three published ahead of Slush 2026. Links to the other two are added here as each one goes live.

• Startup AI Visibility Index: Slush 2026 Edition, covering startups whose founders speak or pitch at Slush 2026
• Slush 100 AI Visibility Index 2026, covering this year's Slush 100 pitch competition companies

For a related study of large listed companies, see our Nordic AI Overviews Index. It measures how often Google shows an AI Overview when someone searches for a company by name.

Update log

• Slush 2026 (October): first edition, data collected on 26 October 2026. If your company is missing, matched to the wrong website or listed in the wrong index, contact us and we will correct it in the next update.

This is independent analysis by Generate More, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Slush. You may use the figures with a link to this page as the source.