PREDICTION 01
Healthcare startups will dominate AI citations this year
Of the five healthcare finalists, three have structured clinical terminology on their domains and published research abstracts — the exact signals that make AI engines reach for a citation. Rea Diagnostics and Orion Therapeutics in particular are already surfacing in Perplexity medical queries. ChatGPT tends to cite peer-reviewed adjacent content, and healthcare companies that publish any technical documentation stand a real chance of showing up unprompted.
PREDICTION 02
Robotics companies have the worst AI visibility gap
Hardware-first companies like Pike Robotics and Inductive Robotics have compelling products and zero AI-readable content strategy. Their websites are built for investors, not for language models. When someone asks ChatGPT "which robotics startups are solving logistics automation," these companies are invisible — not because they are not relevant, but because the content that would get them cited does not exist yet. This category has the largest gap between product quality and AI mention rate.
PREDICTION 03
Student startups are punching above their weight
Arrow Analytics and Pinpoint Irrigation scored higher than expected. Student-founded companies that have been covered by university press offices, regional news, or accelerator blogs have an SEO-adjacent content trail that AI engines can actually read. Arrow Analytics has been mentioned in Texas A&M coverage, which creates the kind of third-party citation chain that Perplexity and Gemini use to decide who to name. The academic origin story travels further than founders expect.
PREDICTION 04
Sustainability brands need to fix their structured data
PLNTmatter and Green Steel Environmental both have compelling products and credible missions. Their problem is technical: neither domain has schema markup, and their content is heavy on visuals and light on crawlable text. When Gemini or ChatGPT answers "which sustainable food startups are worth watching," it needs something to pull — a paragraph, a defined product description, a cited fact. Right now these brands are relying on their mission to do the work that structured content needs to do.