This post was sponsored by Victorious. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
A year into the shift toward AI search, the marketing industry is full of confident takes about the factors that impact AI visibility. But we’ve seen very little data to support commonly held assumptions.
We wanted to see what correlations we could find between traditional search performance and AI mentions and citations. So we built a study to see if we could uncover evidence-based recommendations from the data.
The Study Methodology: Comparing Traditional Search vs. AI Search Performance
To compare how brands perform in traditional search versus AI search, we needed a dataset that captured both signals for the same companies during the same period of time.
We built it out in four phases.
Step 1: Determine The Brand Set.
We selected a representative cross-section of 177 brands across five verticals: healthcare, SaaS, financial services, ecommerce/retail, and legal services.
Step 2: Capture The AI Visibility Signal.
For each brand, we tested vertical-specific prompts across eight AI platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Meta AI. That gave us 107,011 AI responses to analyze.
For every response, we recorded two things: whether the platform named the brand (mention), and whether it linked to the brand’s domain as a source (citation).
Step 3: Pull The Organic Performance Data.
For the same 177 brands, we tracked domain-level organic performance in Semrush during the first quarter of 2026, including traffic trends and Authority Scores.
Step 4: Cross-Reference The Two Datasets.
We joined the AI visibility data with the organic data so every brand had three comparable measures: mention rate, citation rate, and Authority Score. That structure let us look at the relationship between traditional ranking signals and AI visibility, and whether those factors were more or less related across the different verticals.
Why We Tracked Mention Rate & Citations Separately
One metric doesn’t capture AI visibility, so we tracked both mention rate and citation rate as separate signals. For example, a brand can be mentioned often and cited rarely, or cited often and rarely mentioned. Tracking both separately, rather than collapsing them into a single “AI visibility” score, ended up being central to the nuances we could pull from the different verticals.
Finding 1: Most Brands Have No AI Mentions At All
Of the 177 brands in our dataset, only 18 had any AI mention rate above zero in Q1 2026. That means 89.8 percent of the brands we tested were largely absent from AI search across the eight platforms we measured. They weren’t mentioned. The brands weren’t surfaced in relation to answers, as sources, or examples.
This runs counter to a lot of the current industry chatter, which treats AI visibility as a race that’s already well underway. Our data shows a very different picture. For an overwhelming number of brands, the race hasn’t yet begun.
The fact that only 18 of the 177 brands in our research registered any AI mentions at all indicates that brands willing to take AI visibility seriously now will be competing against a small number of incumbents in their vertical, not against the entire category.
Finding 2: AI Visibility Patterns Vary By Vertical
Once we broke the data down by vertical, three distinct patterns emerged.
Mentioned & Cited: Healthcare, SaaS & Financial Services Brands
Brands within these three verticals were consistently mentioned and cited, but for different reasons. Healthcare brands benefit from clear entity identifiers such as names, locations, specialties, and network affiliations, which reinforce the signals that AI platforms use to evaluate expertise and authority. SaaS brands are commonly featured on third-party platforms such as G2, Reddit, and LinkedIn, where products are discussed by users and reviewers. Financial Services benefits from strong editorial media presence on platforms like MarketWatch, Bankrate, and NerdWallet, which are common sources AI platforms turn to for financial questions.
Financial Services was also the only vertical where citation slightly exceeded mention, which suggests AI platforms trust the content slightly more than it trusts specific brands yet.
In each case, the brands that show up have something AI platforms can attach the brand identity to: structured data, third-party validation, or editorial coverage. The brands that don’t show up usually lack one or more of those.
Mentioned More Than Cited: Ecommerce & Retail Brands
Ecommerce posted the widest gap in our dataset. AI platforms recognize these brands but pull their source material from somewhere else, usually marketplaces, aggregators, and review sites rather than the brands’ own domains.
For these brands, recognition comes from marketplace presence and consumer familiarity. The bigger challenge for ecommerce brands is giving AI platforms content worth citing on their own domain, instead of leaving the field to Amazon, Reddit, and review aggregators.
Cited But Rarely Mentioned: Legal Services
Legal services posted the inverse pattern as ecommerce brands. AI platforms regularly source content from legal sites, but they rarely credit the firm behind the article.
Closing that gap means building the entity signals that connect a piece of content back to a recognizable firm.
Findings 3 – 4
Each AI platform draws from a different set of sources.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot show preferences for specific types of content. The full report breaks down mention rates by platform and vertical, so you can focus on the AI platforms your buyers actually use.
Personalization may be compounding early AI visibility.
Google’s Personal Intelligence update pulls signals from a user’s Gmail and Photos into AI Mode responses, biasing results toward brands the user has already encountered. If that effect holds, brands that win a user’s first AI interaction on a topic could compound their visibility faster than later entrants. The full report walks through what we’re watching in Q2 to test this.
Key Takeaway
If you take away nothing else from this data, remember that you haven’t lost first-mover advantage. With only 18 of the 177 brands we measured earning mentions AI search, there’s still white space in your vertical waiting to be claimed.
You can read the full Q1 2026 Quarterly Search Report on our site.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Victorious. Used with permission.
In-Post Images: Images by victorious. Used with permission.
