The landscape of digital marketing is undergoing a seismic shift as artificial intelligence transitions from a novelty tool to a primary interface for consumer discovery. A comprehensive new analysis conducted by Semrush, in collaboration with Growth Memo founder Kevin Indig, has revealed a startling lack of brand dominance within ChatGPT’s conversational ecosystem. According to the study, which examined over 1,000 distinct U.S. product and service categories, only 15.2% of ChatGPT topic categories possessed a clear brand "owner" across related buyer inquiries. This finding suggests that nearly 85% of commercial categories remain an open frontier, with no single brand successfully capturing the lion’s share of AI-generated recommendations or mentions.
The research highlights a critical disconnect between traditional search engine visibility and the emerging field of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). While brands have spent decades perfecting their presence on traditional search engine results pages (SERPs), the logic governing ChatGPT’s output appears to follow a different set of rules. Appearing in a single prompt or being cited in a footnote does not guarantee that a brand will maintain its presence across a series of related questions within the same topic. This inconsistency presents both a challenge for established market leaders and a significant opportunity for agile competitors to stake their claim in the AI-driven search market.
Defining Brand Ownership in the Age of AI
To quantify "ownership" in a medium as fluid as generative AI, Semrush established a rigorous set of criteria. A category owner was defined as a brand that secured the highest share of mentions within ChatGPT’s generated responses. Specifically, the brand had to appear in at least four out of five related prompts within a category and maintain a lead of at least five percentage points over the nearest runner-up.
This multi-prompt approach was designed to mimic the natural progression of a buyer’s journey. Rather than looking at a single isolated query, the study utilized a cluster of five prompts for each category, covering essential stages of the funnel: definitions, comparisons, alternatives, use cases, and final buying decisions. By analyzing brand persistence across these varied contexts, the researchers were able to determine whether ChatGPT consistently associated a specific brand with a broader topic or merely mentioned it as a one-off reference.
The results indicate that achieving this level of consistency is remarkably difficult. The data shows that even if a brand is the first recommendation for a "best of" list, it may disappear entirely when the user asks for a comparison or a specific use case. This lack of "topic authority" suggests that the underlying large language models (LLMs) are drawing from a fragmented pool of data rather than a unified brand-to-category map.
The Search Demand Paradox
One of the most counterintuitive findings of the study was the relationship between search demand and brand ownership. Semrush divided the analyzed categories into two groups based on AI search volume. Paradoxically, categories with higher search demand—those where consumers are most active—were less likely to have a dominant brand owner.
In the top half of categories by search volume, only 11.3% had a clear owner. In contrast, 19% of topics in the lower-demand half had a dominant leader. This suggests that as a topic becomes more popular and commercially viable, the competition for visibility within the AI’s training data and retrieval systems intensifies, leading to a more diluted field of brand mentions. For marketers, this means that the most valuable "head terms" in AI search are currently the most unsettled, offering a window of opportunity for brands to implement aggressive GEO strategies before the market matures.
The Decline of Traditional SEO Metrics as Predictors
For years, metrics such as Domain Authority, backlink profiles, and keyword density have been the North Star for digital marketers. However, the Semrush analysis found that these traditional SEO strengths have limited predictive value when it comes to ChatGPT visibility. A high-ranking website on Google does not automatically translate to being the "owner" of a topic in an AI-generated response.
"Traditional SEO metrics aren’t enough to explain who owns a topic," noted Kevin Indig in his analysis of the data. "While they play their role, there’s more to it." This sentiment reflects a growing consensus in the industry that LLMs prioritize semantic relevance, entity relationships, and the synthesis of information over the technical signals that Google’s algorithm emphasizes.
The study suggests that ChatGPT’s internal ranking mechanism—often referred to as its "latent space"—is influenced more by how frequently and authoritatively a brand is discussed in relation to a topic across the web, rather than just the technical optimization of the brand’s own website. This shift necessitates a move toward "entity-based" marketing, where the goal is to solidify the brand’s association with specific concepts and solutions in the broader digital discourse.
Mentions vs. Citations: The Battle for Mindshare
A critical distinction made in the study was the difference between "mentions" and "citations." While ChatGPT often provides links or citations at the bottom of its responses to attribute information, the Semrush study measured ownership based on brand mentions within the actual body of the answer text.
The data revealed that being the most-cited source rarely equated to being the most-mentioned brand. This is a vital distinction for brand awareness. While citations provide a path for the user to click through to a website, the text of the AI response itself is what shapes the user’s perception and provides the immediate answer. If ChatGPT discusses a competitor’s features in the main text but cites a brand’s blog post for a minor definition in the footnotes, the competitor is the one gaining the "topic authority" in the eyes of the user.
This finding reinforces the idea that brands must focus on becoming part of the narrative that the AI constructs. Simply providing information that the AI uses as a reference is not enough; the brand itself must be the subject of the recommendation or the solution being described.
Stability and the Vulnerability of Narrow Leads
For the 15.2% of brands that did manage to secure category ownership, the news was largely positive regarding their staying power. The study found that clear category owners—those who met the rigorous criteria of consistency and lead margin—remained in the top spot in 90.4% of month-over-month comparisons. This indicates that once a brand establishes a strong "topical bond" within the AI’s logic, it is difficult for competitors to dislodge them in the short term.
However, the stability of a brand’s position is heavily dependent on the size of its lead. The study categorized many leaders as "weaker" or "unsettled." In these cases, the top brand switched in 1,950 out of 5,470 comparisons. When a brand lost its first-place position, its typical lead in the previous month had been a mere 1.3 percentage points. Conversely, brands that successfully maintained their lead typically held a margin of at least 2.9 percentage points.
This data suggests a "tipping point" in AI visibility. Once a brand exceeds a certain threshold of dominance, it enters a virtuous cycle of reinforcement. But for brands with only a marginal lead, the AI’s output remains volatile, frequently rotating through different brands as its internal weights or the underlying data sources shift.
Methodology and Scope of the 2026 Analysis
The data for this study was collected using the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, covering a six-month period from January through June 2026. The scale of the research was immense, encompassing:
- 1,094 U.S.-based product and service categories.
- More than 50,000 individual brands.
- 220,000 domains and 220,000 unique URLs.
- 600,000 citations within ChatGPT responses.
Each category was tested using five specific prompts designed to capture the full spectrum of the buyer’s journey. These included:
- Definitions: Asking for an explanation of the category or technology.
- Comparisons: Requesting a breakdown of the differences between top players.
- Alternatives: Seeking other options beyond the most well-known brands.
- Use Cases: Investigating how products in the category solve specific problems.
- Buying Decisions: Asking for recommendations on which product to purchase based on specific criteria.
By tracking brand mentions across these five dimensions, the study provided the most granular look to date at how ChatGPT perceives brand authority.
Strategic Implications and the Path Forward
The overarching takeaway for CMOs and digital strategists is that AI visibility is not a "one-and-done" achievement. It is a topic-level game that requires a holistic approach to digital presence. The fact that 85% of categories lack a dominant owner should be viewed as a call to action.
To capture ownership in this new era, brands must look beyond traditional SEO. Strategies now being discussed by industry experts include:
- Entity Association: Ensuring that the brand is mentioned in high-quality, authoritative contexts alongside the keywords and concepts it wishes to own.
- Narrative Consistency: Providing clear, consistent information about the brand’s value proposition across various platforms to ensure that AI models can synthesize a coherent brand story.
- GEO Optimization: Focusing on the specific types of content that LLMs favor, such as structured data, clear comparative lists, and authoritative "how-to" guides that address the specific use cases ChatGPT is frequently asked about.
As AI search continues to evolve, the "winner-take-all" dynamics seen in traditional search may eventually replicate in the AI space. However, for now, the data from 2026 suggests that the field is wide open. Brands that can demonstrate consistency across related buyer questions will be the ones to define the next generation of digital authority. If AI cannot find or consistently recommend a brand today, customers likely won’t either in the near future.
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