This is Article 8 of the Female Founder Economy series.

In this series, I define and document the Female Founder Economy: the goals, priorities, revenue models, and growth patterns of entrepreneurial women who are building their companies primarily online. Topics explored across the series include, but are not limited to, visibility, leadership, team and scale, revenue and economic impact, emotional and mental well-being, relationship capital, and AI.

The AI Visibility Gap Nobody Is Talking About

Between 2019 and 2025, the gap between how much men and women business owners use AI in their daily work got eight times wider.

Every headline reported it the same way. Women are behind on AI.

That’s the wrong story.

It asks whether women can see and understand AI. Almost nobody is asking whether AI can effectively see women and their businesses and accurately recommend them.

And AI is already deciding who to recommend to clients and consumers.

47% of U.S. adults used AI to find a local business in the past month, according to Yext’s 2026 Consumer Search Behaviors Report, and in households earning $150,000 and up, AI has passed Google as the place people start looking.

We have handed LLMs the job of telling millions of people who to hire, who to buy from, and who to trust. Almost nobody has checked whether it says women’s names.

Two studies have looked at this. Here is what they found.

A study published this spring ran 2,520 queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, asking each one to name the top experts, analysts and founders in tech. It collected 10,711 names. When the question was who the top founders and CEOs are, 9.8% of those names were women. One in ten, in an industry that is 28% women. Roughly a third of our actual share.

The only other study I can find asked chatbots to recommend eye doctors in the 20 largest U.S. cities. Women are 27.2% of practicing ophthalmologists. Bing named a woman 1.61% of the time.

Then the tech study did one more thing. It ran a control question: who are the most important women in this field?

That query came back 96.5% women.

The women are in there. The models know exactly who we are. They produce us instantly, accurately, on request. They just don’t do it unless you ask for women specifically.

AI recommendations have a default, and the default is men.

It isn’t a mystery how we got here. A model can only recommend what it has a record of, and the record of women was thin long before any of this got built.

Just twenty percent of English Wikipedia biographies are about women. Only a quarter of the people quoted in economic news coverage are women, and when we are quoted, it’s more often as eyewitnesses than as experts.

Add the smaller digital footprints female founders have always carried. Fewer awards. Fewer media features. Fewer credible backlinks to their website domains.

Feed a system thirty years of that and it hands the same world back, faster and with more confidence.

Nobody has run any of these studies specifically on women-owned businesses specifically that I could find. Not one researcher, anywhere. The data is limited to whether AI recognizes and recommends women as experts in their fields.

1 in 10 AI recommendations were women.

Most of the women I know built companies where their name is the brand. If you are a founder-led business, you are the search result. A woman who doesn’t get named by AI search is a business that doesn’t get recommended, is a sale that isn’t made.

So where are we headed?

The visibility gap and the revenue gap will continue to get wider for female founders, not narrower. AI and the internet are not democratizing business.

The real acceleration of the gap hasn’t even arrived yet. Once corporations move to buy up ad placement inside AI results (which is already beginning), everything becomes more difficult.

And female founders get priced out of  the biggest marketing channel they were never visible in to begin with.

You won’t get a rejection. You don’t lose the sale. You were never visible in the first place.

So what can we do?

I changed The Power Table marketing strategy this year because of this AI visibility gap. We’re heavily focused on long form authority content that is text heavy and original, We pursue domain backlinks. Higher-quality collaborations. Real press coverage. We write articles, long form LinkedIn posts, and podcast show notes with enough substance to stand on their own.

We’re intentionally expanding our indexable digital footprint instead of feeling safe in social media content.

I want to encourage you to run the test on yourself or your business. Use an incognito window. Ask an AI tool to recommend someone who does what you do and see whether your name comes up. Then ask it directly about you and see what it actually knows. See if it’s accurate. Finally, pull up your last three months of content and digital presence and count how much of it is text, and how much can be found about you on pages and websites you don’t personally own. 

For most of the women I know, that last number is close to zero. Years of work, almost none of it in a form that will now be indexed by AI effectively.

You don’t need more content. You need more citations.

And for the experts wondering how to get women to adopt AI faster, adoption will not fix this.

The problem was never what women do with the tool. It’s what the tool says about women.

The old version of gender bias in business was sitting at the table and never getting called on. The new version is not being shown in the data at all.

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Sources: JPMorgan Chase Institute, “The AI Adoption Gap: Gender and Generation Among Small Business Owners” (May 2026); Yext, 2026 Consumer Search Behaviors Report; Daniel Grainger, “One Woman for Every Ten: How AI Names the Experts in Tech,” Ranking Atlas (April 2026); Oca et al., “Bias and Inaccuracy in AI Chatbot Ophthalmologist Recommendations,” Cureus (September 2023); WikiProject Women in Red / Wikimedia, December 2024; Global Media Monitoring Project 2025, via UN Women

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This is Article 8 in the Female Founder Economy series.

I write this series from what I see firsthand: the rooms, the private conversations, and the businesses women are actually building. The entire article series can be found on my website, www.taylorsmithonline.com

For media inquiries, interview requests, or speaking opportunities, use the contact form on my website or reach me directly at taylor@taylorsmithonline.com.