Daniel Espejo

Visibility of Spanish founders and startups in AI answers

Bilingual research benchmark

Window20 Aug → 19 Sep 2026
MarketSpain · es
Prompts8 non-branded
EnginesOpenAI · Google AI

Updated · 15 October 2026

The short answer

Visibility in AI answers is concentrated in a small group of brands and founders with editorial coverage, public profiles, and ranking pages. In the monitored set, Glovo leads with 38.11% visibility and 101 mentions. Daniel Espejo ranks 47th by visibility, at 1.89%, and 48th by share of voice, with 5 mentions.

This is not a universal ranking of the Spanish startup ecosystem. It describes what three engines returned for eight specific questions during a thirty-one-day window. The most useful signal for anyone trying to appear is the source engines retrieve: of 4,593 citation events, 3,902 came from third-party pages, 677 from social sources, and 14 from owned pages.

What we measured

This benchmark uses non-branded Prompts only. The questions do not include “Daniel Espejo”, “Omnia”, or another named brand. They measure discovery and competitive representation, not how an engine responds when asked directly about Daniel.

The eight Prompts were:

  1. Which Spanish founder stands out in artificial intelligence?
  2. Who is the founder of Spain’s most promising AI startup?
  3. Which emerging Spanish startup founders should I follow?
  4. Who is the founder of Spain’s best artificial intelligence startup?
  5. Who is the best early-stage startup founder in Spain?
  6. Which Spanish startup founders stand out in 2026?
  7. Which Spanish startup founder should I follow to learn?
  8. Who are the most influential startup founders in Spain?

The metrics mean:

  • Visibility: the percentage of monitored answers in which an entity appears.
  • Share of voice: the portion of all entity mentions that belongs to an entity within the set.
  • Mentions: the number of answers in which an entity appears.
  • Citation: a reference in an answer to a specific page or source. One answer can contain multiple citations.

The aggregate figures cover all three engines and all eight Prompts. Ties in visibility and share of voice use the order returned by Omnia.

The monitored-set result

Rank Entity Visibility Share of voice Mentions
1 Glovo 38.11% 7.36% 101
2 Cabify 28.68% 5.61% 77
3 Factorial 26.42% 5.10% 70
4 Clarity AI 20.38% 4.01% 55
5 Multiverse Computing 17.36% 3.35% 46
6 Sherpa.ai 16.60% 3.20% 44
7 Itnig 12.45% 2.40% 33
8 TravelPerk 12.08% 2.33% 32
9 Clibrain 10.94% 2.11% 29
10 Wallbox 10.94% 2.11% 29
47 Daniel Espejo 1.89% 0.36% 5

The leaders appear across several source classes: company pages, editorial coverage, founder profiles, rankings, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and YouTube. That repetition gives engines more than one way to describe them.

The engine split matters

The aggregate hides an important difference:

Engine Daniel’s result Observed mentions Reading
OpenAI 14th by visibility, 5.43% 5 The only engine where he appears inside the main aggregate group.
Google AI Overviews Outside the visible top 100 Not in the visible top-100 aggregate Retrieved sources lean toward third parties, YouTube, rankings, and ecosystem pages.
Google AI Mode Outside the visible top 100 Not in the visible top-100 aggregate LinkedIn, YouTube, Wikipedia, and media carry more weight in the citation map.

The table does not claim Daniel never appears in Overviews or AI Mode. It makes the narrower claim that he is not in the first 100 entities of the visible aggregate for those engines in this window.

Which sources get retrieved

The full map contains 1,335 cited URLs. The split by source type is:

Source type Citation events Share of total
Third-party 3,902 85.0%
Social 677 14.7%
Owned 14 0.3%

The domains with the most citation events were:

Domain Events
El País 386
LinkedIn 250
Emprendedores 188
YouTube 183
Wikipedia 141
Javadex 133
Fundación Marqués de Oliva 129
Forbes España 129
Startup Valencia 104
Moncloa 94

The pattern changes by engine:

  • OpenAI: El País, LinkedIn, Forbes España, Wikipedia, and Emprendedores lead the domain map.
  • Google AI Overviews: YouTube, Fundación Marqués de Oliva, Startup Valencia, Qonto, Emprendedores, and Javadex lead the citations.
  • Google AI Mode: LinkedIn, YouTube, Emprendedores, Javadex, Wikipedia, and Startup Valencia appear at the top.

Among the individual URLs with the most citations in the aggregate are Javadex, “Las 10 Startups de IA Españolas que Estan Rompiendo en 2026”, with 131; Moncloa, “Las 25 personas más influyentes del emprendimiento en España en 2026”, with 89; Startup Valencia, “Las mayores ventas de startups en España”, with 81; and Innovaspain, “Las 10 startups más prometedoras en España en 2026”, with 50.

These pages share several observable traits:

  • They answer the question as a list or ranking.
  • They name people and companies explicitly.
  • They give concrete context about the founder, company, category, or transaction.
  • They have an author, date, and stable URL.
  • They are indexable pages with accessible main content and a clear editorial structure.

That does not prove that one trait causes citations. It shows the type of source that repeats in this monitored set.

The Daniel Espejo case

Daniel appears in 5 of 93 captured answers for “¿Qué fundadores de startups emergentes de España debería seguir?” The five appearances were OpenAI answers within the observation window. He does not appear in the other seven Prompts in the answer metadata reviewed.

The owned page Spanish AI Startup Founders 2026 earned 12 citations in the full aggregate. Owned sources account for 14 events in total because another Daniel URL contributes 2 citations. The page is live, returns HTTP 200, is served in the initial HTML, and presents a clear list of established and emerging names. It also states that Daniel appears in the list and discloses his affiliation.

The page has an early useful signal, but the gap is wide: the four highlighted third-party URLs above each have between 50 and 131 citations, compared with 12 for the owned page. In the full map, owned sources account for 14 events, while third-party sources account for 3,902.

The correct reading is early presence that still depends on an external editorial layer. The owned page can already be retrieved. The gap is that more independent sources need to describe Daniel clearly enough for engines to include him in Google answers as well.

What founders can learn from the result

An owned page does not replace independent coverage

A biography or owned list helps an engine understand who you are. In this set, most citations come from media, rankings, social profiles, discovery platforms, and ecosystem pages. The work does not end when a correct page is published.

Lists work when they carry checkable facts

The sources that appear most often are not abstract opinion pages. They give engines names, companies, sectors, rounds, acquisitions, locations, or milestones. A list without an explicit standard adds little. A list that explains why each entry belongs gives the engine more material to cite.

Repeated identity helps

The most visible profiles are described consistently across several sites. The name, role, company, category, and milestones appear in recognisable form across articles, profiles, rankings, and owned pages. That repetition reduces ambiguity about the entity.

The engine matters

Daniel already appears in OpenAI for a founder-discovery question. That result does not automatically transfer to Google AI Overviews or AI Mode. Distribution should follow the source pattern each engine retrieves, rather than assuming one page will win everywhere.

The signal needs an update path

This benchmark ends on 19 September 2026. Rankings, funding, roles, and editorial pages change. A public edition should carry its date, method, and observation window, and keep the same query set so a later comparison remains valid.

What I would do next

Goal: increase the chance that different engines retrieve Daniel for Spanish founder and startup discovery questions.

Action: publish this benchmark as a Spanish page and an English page, with visible methodology, result tables, source map, and update date. Then pursue legitimate coverage in the publication types already present in the map, starting with media and communities that publish founder lists or profiles.

Why: the current data shows a clear difference between owned citation, 12 events on the existing page, and third-party citation, 3,902 events across the set. The main gap is outside Daniel’s domain.

Where: on the two benchmark pages and in external publications that have a real editorial reason to cover the data. Coverage, reviews, or mentions should not be manufactured.

Limits

This is not a ranking of every Spanish founder, nor a measurement of all ChatGPT or Google traffic. It includes eight non-branded Prompts, the Spanish location, and three monitored engines during the stated window. It excludes Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and branded queries.

Visibility and share-of-voice figures come from the monitored aggregates. The answer inspection used for the Daniel case study works with metadata from 93 answers per Prompt. Engines change their answers and sources, so this is a reproducible view of the period, not a permanent property of a person or brand.

Daniel Espejo is affiliated with this report and with Omnia. Readers should know that affiliation when interpreting the case study.

Sources and traceability