I Asked AI 18 Questions About the Royal Family. Here's Why I Did It.

I have been carrying a question around for two years.

If AI engines are now the audience — if a third of consumers now begin product research inside a chatbox, not on Google — then who is measuring what the engines actually say?

The answer, when I went looking, was nobody.

There were vendors selling AI visibility scores. There were research firms still polling sentiment. There were agencies promising GEO services. There was nobody publishing the actual data on what the engines actually return when buyers ask.

So I built it.

This week I published the first issue of a new instrument at 5W AI Communications. The 5W Citation Share Index™. The first issue measures what AI says about the British royal family. I picked the royals because they are the most-followed family in the English-speaking world. If the methodology works on them, it works on anyone.

Buckingham Palace 70. Harry and Meghan 51.

The Palace won five of six categories. The Sussexes won one — commercial activity — by 34 points, the widest single-category gap in the study. They won it in the only round working senior royals are constitutionally barred from entering.

I will tell you what I learned from running this.

AI engines have a structural preference for institutions.

When the engine could plausibly cite either side, it reaches for the institutional source first. The Palace's institutional record is a moat. I knew this in theory. Watching it produce a 47-point gap in the public-events category — in real verbatim AI output — made it real for me in a way no theory ever had.

The engines have already absorbed the polarization of the people they cite.

The Palace draws 58 percent neutral-context citations. The Sussexes draw 37 percent positive and 34 percent negative, with only 29 percent neutral. The engines are no longer averaging. They have learned, like we have, that some people are loved and hated by different audiences and that the average is meaningless.

Some categories cannot be won. They can only be entered.

The Palace's 62-point lead on succession is not a function of better reputation work. It is a function of constitutional fact. Reputation work has a ceiling. Knowing where your ceilings are is the whole game.

Direct-to-platform commerce now produces measurable Citation Share.

This is the one that matters most for everyone who runs a business. Sussex Inc. is the cleanest test case in modern history of a direct-to-platform operation. Netflix. Spare. Archewell. As Ever. The speaking circuit. The engines name those assets. They name them by deal value. They name them by partner. The engine has rendered direct-to-platform commerce as a category and assigned scores to it. We can measure it now.

That changes what we ask of celebrity partnerships. It changes what we ask of executive media work. It changes what the next decade of brand-building looks like.

Why I built this.

I built this instrument because I needed it for my clients. The royal family was the test case I picked because it would get the methodology in front of the people who need to use it.

Reputation used to be sentiment. A number you paid a research firm to produce. It measured what people said when asked.

Citation Share is a number the engines produce. It measures what AI says when buyers ask. The difference is that the engines are now the audience.

The full study, every prompt, every verbatim AI answer, the locked scoring formula, is at 5wpr.com/research/what-does-ai-say-about-the-royal-family/.

If you have ten minutes to read one piece of research this week, read this one. Not because the royals are interesting — although they are. Because the framework is going to apply to your business inside of six months, whether or not you measure it.

Issue No. 1 is the royal family. The instrument is the work.

AI Communications is a mix of journalism, psychology, and engineering.

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