Namebeam
The dated record of who AI names
AI engines do not give the same answer every day. Here is how often the same business was named across September 2026.
Unit: a business an engine named at least once for one niche in one market (a "named pairing"). Coin-flip zone: named on at least 2 and at most 8 of every 10 answered days.
| Engine | Named pairings | Named on every answered day | In coin-flip zone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 515 | 7 of 515 (1.4%) | 172 of 515 (33.4%) |
| Gemini | 473 | 23 of 473 (4.9%) | 148 of 473 (31.3%) |
| OpenAI API | 139 | 0 of 139 (0.0%) | 18 of 139 (12.9%) |
| Anthropic API | 8 | 0 of 8 (0.0%) | 1 of 8 (12.5%) |
| All four | 1,135 | 30 of 1,135 (2.6%) | 339 of 1,135 (29.9%) |
For each named pairing, p is the number of days the engine named the business divided by the number of days the engine answered. A business named on 19 of 24 answered days has p of about 0.79. We call a pairing "coin-flip" when p is between 0.2 and 0.8 inclusive. Two examples on Perplexity: T Rock Roofing, Dallas TX residential roofing, named on 19 of 24 answered days; Malone Painting, St. Louis MO interior painting, named on 18 of 24.
A check run once a month sees one day. For a business in the coin-flip zone, that one day can show the business named or not named, and both results fit the same September record. Across all four engines, 339 of 1,135 named pairings (29.9%) were in that zone, September 1 to 27, 2026. Only 30 of 1,135 (2.6%) were named on every answered day. Of those 30, 17 are Gemini pairings that rest on 1 answered day; the other 13 of 1,135 (1.1%) were named on every answered day across 2 or more answered days.
Gemini answered on as few as 1 and at most 19 days per niche and market. When the number of answered days is small, p can only take a few values, so a pairing can look steady or unsteady because of how few days it has. Read the Gemini rows with that in mind.
Method. Receipts Metrics v1.1 (metric S), answered days only; a failed or refused run is not counted as a no; the same name gate and alias merge as our published sample sheets, plus a second filter that removes strings that are not business names: generic legal, trade and advice phrases, place names, directories and platforms, government bodies, trade associations, product brands, attractions and class names. That filter removed 700 of the 1,835 named pairings (38.1%) in the first version of this page.
Data window: September 1 to 27, 2026. Published 2026-10-06.
Corrected 2026-10-06: non-business phrases removed from the count. The first version of this page showed 1,835 named pairings, 31 named on every answered day and 449 in the coin-flip zone for September 1 to 27, 2026.
See the agency audit pack and the 13 samples built from the same record.