ChatGPT is far from settled on the brands that define most shopping categories. A Semrush analysis found that only 15.2% of topic categories had a clear brand leader across a range of related buyer questions, suggesting that AI visibility remains highly competitive even for established businesses.
The study examined 1,094 U.S. categories using five common buying prompts for each topic, including definitions, comparisons, alternatives, use cases and purchasing decisions. To qualify as a category owner, a brand had to appear in at least four of the five responses and beat the closest competitor by at least five percentage points.
Only 166 categories met this standard.
Another 31.2% had an emerging leader, where a brand appeared in at least three prompts but lacked a decisive lead. The remaining 53.7% had no consistent leader.
Visibility varies depending on buyer questions
The results suggest that appearing in an AI-generated response does not necessarily translate into broader category appropriation.
Instead, visibility changes as buyers ask different questions about the same topic. This makes measuring performance across an entire shopping journey more useful than tracking ranks for individual prompts.
This trend was even more pronounced in high-demand topics. Among half of the categories generating the most AI search activity, only 11.3% had a clear owner. Less competitive categories were a bit more stable, with 19% producing a dominant brand.
Since the most searched topics accounted for 98% of the AI search volume in the study, most buyer activity occurred in categories in which no brands consistently appeared.
Traditional SEO only explains part of AI visibility
Semrush also compared category ownership with conventional SEO metrics, including branded search volume, organic traffic, and authority score.
Brand search volume was the only metric that consistently correlated with category ownership. Organic traffic and authority scores showed little relationship to whether ChatGPT consistently associated a brand with a topic.
The analysis also found that quotes and brand mentions often diverged. Only 21% of the most cited domains within a category were also the brand mentioned most frequently in ChatGPT responses, suggesting that citation counts alone provide an incomplete picture of AI visibility.
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Small leads are easy to lose
When brands established clear category ownership, they typically retained it. Category leaders remained in first place in more than 90% of monthly comparisons.
Less established leaders proved much more unstable. In emerging and unstable categories, the leading brand changed almost 2,000 times during the study period. Categories with narrow leads were also more likely to see a change in leadership than those with wider gaps between competitors.
For marketers, the findings reinforce that AI search visibility extends beyond the ranking of individual prompts. Since buyers ask a series of related questions before making a purchasing decision, a consistent association with a topic as a whole seems more valuable than in a single AI response.
The full study is available here. (No registration required)
The position ChatGPT lacks a clear leading brand in most categories appeared first on MarTech.
