Most businesses assume AI visibility is something they either have or don't — a pass/fail state, roughly similar to ranking or not ranking on Google. A new industry study suggests that's the wrong mental model entirely. The real picture is closer to a leaky faucet: even brands that show up sometimes rarely show up consistently, across every platform, every month.
The Study, and the Headline Number
Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index is the largest study of its kind to date. It analyzed 126 million U.S. AI search prompts collected between January and April 2026, tracking how more than 1,200 brands across 22 industries were mentioned, cited, and represented across ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews.
The headline finding: only 36 of those brands — a group Semrush calls "the Universal 36" — appeared in the top-100-most-mentioned list on every platform, every month, throughout the study. Put the other way around: 97% of the brands studied failed to maintain that kind of consistent, cross-platform visibility.
This isn't a story about a handful of unlucky companies falling short. At this scale, inconsistent AI visibility is clearly the default outcome, not the exception.
The Measurement Gap Behind the Number
Part of why so few brands maintain consistent visibility may simply be that most aren't tracking it well enough to manage it. The same study found that 45% of marketing leaders say they cannot accurately measure their brand's visibility within AI-generated answers at all, and only 9% say they have the tools to track it across every relevant platform.
That's a genuinely uncomfortable gap: the majority of marketing leaders can't reliably answer the basic question "are we visible to AI right now?" — which makes it very hard to know whether you're one of the 36, or one of the 97%, until something (a drop in inquiries, a competitor showing up where you used to) forces the question.
The More Useful Finding: Integration Beats Separation
The part of the study most worth acting on wasn't the headline number — it was a companion finding about how the more successful brands operate.
Semrush found that among organizations that fully integrate SEO and AI visibility into a single strategy, 81% reported increased traffic or leads from AI platforms. Among organizations that manage the two as separate functions, only 36% reported the same result.
That's a striking gap for what sounds, on paper, like a fairly small organizational choice — whether SEO and AI visibility live in one strategy or two. It suggests the businesses pulling ahead aren't necessarily doing more work; they're doing the same work without the artificial wall between "ranking on Google" and "getting cited by AI" that most marketing organizations still maintain by default.
This matches something we've built our own approach around: every one of our packages includes both SEO and AEO together, on the reasoning that treating them separately leaves an obvious gap for a competitor to fill. It's genuinely useful to see independent, large-scale data now backing that reasoning up. Every SweetReed pricing package is built this way for exactly this reason.
What This Means Practically
A few things worth taking from this, regardless of your industry:
- Stop treating AI visibility as pass/fail. The real question isn't "am I visible to AI," it's "how consistently, across which platforms, and is that changing." A single successful mention doesn't mean you're safe.
- If you can't measure it, you can't know which category you're in. Given 45% of marketing leaders admit they can't measure this at all, a basic starting audit — manually asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini your actual buyer questions and logging what comes back — puts you ahead of a large share of your competitors immediately. Ten signs your business is invisible in AI search is a good place to start that check.
- Stop managing SEO and AI visibility as separate workstreams. The 81%-vs-36% gap is the single most actionable number in the whole study. If your SEO team and whoever handles "AI stuff" aren't the same people or at least the same strategy, that's worth fixing before anything else on this list. If you're a B2B SaaS company specifically, our guide on getting your product cited by ChatGPT walks through what that integration looks like in practice — and if you want to understand where AI citations actually come from in the first place, see why Reddit and G2 get cited more than your own website.
This is also exactly the kind of structural work our AI visibility work is built around.
The Bottom Line
The specific number — 97% of brands failing to stay consistently visible — is a striking headline, but the real value in this study is what separates the businesses that don't fail this way: they stopped treating AI visibility as a side project bolted onto SEO, and started treating it as the same job. That's a strategy change, not a tooling purchase, and it's available to any business willing to make it — regardless of how many brands are already in "the Universal 36."
Frequently Asked Questions
It's a large-scale study analyzing how brands are mentioned and cited across major AI platforms (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews). The 2026 edition analyzed 126 million U.S. AI search prompts collected between January and April 2026, covering over 1,200 brands across 22 industries.
It refers to the 36 brands (out of 1,200+ studied) that appeared in the top-100-most-mentioned list on every AI platform tracked, every month of the study. Everyone else showed up inconsistently — visible on some platforms or in some months, but not reliably across all of them.
The specific 22 industries and brand list are Semrush's own selection, but the underlying pattern — that AI visibility is inconsistent by default, and that measurement is a widespread gap — is unlikely to be unique to those categories. The mechanics of how AI platforms select and cite sources don't change dramatically by industry.
Start manually: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the actual questions your buyers would ask, using your real product/service and location where relevant, and track whether — and how — you're mentioned over time. This is a smaller, manual version of exactly what a formal AI visibility audit does.
The study didn't fully explain the mechanism, but a reasonable read is that AI platforms draw heavily on content and signals that also matter for traditional SEO (structure, authority, citations) — so a business optimizing only one side is leaving obvious groundwork undone for the other.
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