Your next customer may never see your website. Their AI will.
Only 22 of 58 Chicago HVAC businesses are ever recommended by an AI assistant. The rest are invisible — and invisibility, measured honestly, is the beginning of its repair.
Pilot edition Chicago HVAC · Aug 2026 — scores from a multimodel visibility battery and a readiness probe. How scoring works
More buying decisions now start with an AI assistant than with a page of blue links. When an assistant recommends a local business, most companies never come up — not because of the work they do, but because machines cannot find, read, or verify them.
Lodestar Index measures that gap market by market and publishes the result: visibility in real customer questions, technical agent-readiness, and — as it lands — ground-truth verification. Every business in a covered market is scored, free, whether it asks to be or not.
What we are not
We are not an AI-SEO tool. You do not paste a URL in and get a number with an upsell attached. We index whole markets, we publish the method and the raw artifacts, and we do not sell the ranking to anyone at any price. The businesses we score are not our customers — that is the entire point.
We sell watching to businesses, watching a book to agencies, and — as agent traffic arrives — a metered Trust API. None of that touches a grade.
Dual-track by design
Now
Human buyers: agencies, monitoring, certification. Build the longitudinal record while the market is still forming.
Next
Agents: MCP discovery and a metered Trust API, for when software does the shopping.
Always
Independence charter. Machine-readable from day one. Methods you can reproduce.
“Payment never touches the grade. A trust index that flips on re-probe is not a trust index. The score can't be bought — only earned.”
Questions, corrections, or an agency book to monitor: preston@banjo.ventures.
Where to next
The scoreboard itself — every business, ranked.
Battery, probe protocol, flip rate, publish gate.
Free scorecard, no signup, nothing to paste.