For years, ranking well in Google meant sitting somewhere near the top of a list of ten blue links. Ask ChatGPT the same question today and you often only get one answer, maybe two. New research suggests most industries have not yet worked out who that answer belongs to, and the businesses that work it out first could hold the position for a long while.
SEO consultant Kevin Indig teamed up with Semrush to study how ChatGPT answers questions across more than a thousand US business categories between January and June 2026, as set out in his Search Engine Land article on the findings. For each category, they tracked which brand, if any, ChatGPT named most consistently across five typical prompts: a definition question, a comparison, an alternatives search, a use case and a buying question. Only 15.2% of categories had settled on what the study calls a clear “owner”, a brand mentioned in at least four of five prompts with a solid lead over whoever came second. Zoom out to the categories people actually search the most, and the picture gets more striking still: 89.3% of all AI search demand in the study sat inside categories with no clear leader at all.
Once a brand does become the settled answer, though, it is hard to shift. The study found a clear leader kept its position in 90.4% of month-on-month comparisons, and most leadership changes happened in categories where the gap to second place was already narrow.
The study also echoes a point Semrush made in an earlier piece of research on what it called “ghost citations”: the businesses ChatGPT links to as a source and the businesses ChatGPT actually names out loud in its answer are often different companies entirely. Category ownership correlated more strongly with branded search volume, organic traffic and site authority than with how many citations a business picked up, and the relationship between being cited and being named was, if anything, slightly negative. In other words, backlinks on their own will not secure the top spot. Being recognisable across enough of the specific questions your customers actually type, or ask their phone out loud, seems to matter more.
If AEO and GEO are still new terms to you, our earlier guide to SEO, AEO and GEO for small businesses covers what each one means and why they now sit alongside traditional SEO work.
Categories that already have a clear owner tend to share three traits when compared with the runner-up:
None of these three fully explains ownership by itself, but each appears to help a business enter the running in the first place.
One detail stood out by sector. Every industry in the study eventually threw up at least one category with a clear owner, except legal, which was the only sector where not a single category had settled on a dominant brand in ChatGPT’s answers. For a legal practice, that is either an unusually crowded market to break into or an unusually open one, depending on how you look at it. The same logic applies to any tightly local, competitive sector, estate agents included, where being the name that gets said out loud in an AI answer to “best estate agent in Plymouth” could soon matter as much as being the top blue link used to.
The researchers frame this as a limited window rather than a permanent state of affairs. Right now, choosing the wrong five topics to focus content on costs a business relatively little, because most categories are still contestable. In twelve months, once more categories have settled into an owner that is hard to dislodge, that same mistake is likely to cost a good deal more.
