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Semrush Releases 2026 AI Visibility Index, Revealing Its First UK Benchmark

October 13, 2026
Semrush Releases 2026 AI Visibility Index, Revealing Its First UK Benchmark

Latest 2026 AI Visibility Index finds that the brands and sources surfaced by AI vary significantly between the UK and US — and that visibility on one AI platform does not guarantee visibility on another.

Semrush, an Adobe company and the leading brand visibility platform, today announced the latest edition of its 2026 AI Visibility Index at Spotlight London, expanding its flagship research with a dedicated comparison on how major AI platforms surface brands and sources in the UK and US. The findings show that there is no single, global approach by which AI visibility is achieved. The brands that AI platforms mention, the sources they cite, and the level of consistency between platforms all differ by market.
The new report analyzes seven months (January - July 2026) of AI visibility data across fixed monthly sets of 2.5 million UK and 25 million US prompts, built from Semrush search data, across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode, alongside a larger variable dataset of Google AI Overviews results for real search keywords.
Across all seven monthly benchmarks, the four AI platforms agreed less in the UK than in the US on which brands to mention and which sources to cite. On average, any two platforms shared 63 to 70 of their top 100 mentioned brands in the UK, compared with 70 to 78 in the US. The study finds that Gemini mentions more distinct brands per answer than ChatGPT, while ChatGPT cites the most sources per answer of the four platforms studied. 
The result is a more fragmented AI visibility landscape in which brands need to understand their position by market, platform, and category, rather than relying on a single global ranking or approach. A strategy built for US AI answers may not transfer to the UK with the same results, and success requires a tailored, market-specific strategy to address each platform’s source mix and local domain signals like media, publishers, and communities.

For enterprise brands, brand and AI visibility is a global concern. And with every additional market comes additional complexity. Brands need to optimize their own content for the audiences, questions, and expectations of each market, while also building the right third-party signals around them.

Marissa Dacay, Global Vice President, Enterprise Marketing, Adobe

As the landscape continues to grow increasingly complex, the commercial stakes are also growing. Adobe data cited in the report shows that AI-referred visitors convert 60% better than non-AI traffic and generate 53% more revenue per visit. This underscores AI’s increasing role in consumer discovery, evaluation, and selection. 

Each Market Has Its Own Always-Visible Brands

The Index identifies a persistent group of brands that appear among the top 100 mentions on all four AI platforms in every month measured — described in the study as the Universal Core. Twenty-four UK domain records met that standard, compared with 36 in the US, with only 15 domains shared across both markets, including Adobe, Apple, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok and YouTube.
The UK-specific group is strikingly retail-led. Six of the nine domains unique to the UK Universal Core are ecommerce or retail brands: Amazon UK, Argos, Asda, eBay UK, Marks & Spencer and Tesco. BBC, Nike and TripAdvisor UK complete the UK-specific group. The US-specific set is considerably broader, spanning automotive, sport, entertainment and retail.
The findings highlight how local brand ecosystems continue to matter even for global companies. A brand that is consistently visible in one market may have a very different AI footprint in another.

AI is now a decision layer for customers, changing how they discover brands, sort through options and ultimately purchase. That makes visibility a business and commercial growth issue, not only a search issue. The sources and brands that shape decisions in the UK are not identical to those in the US, and teams need to build for those differences while keeping brands consistently discovered, evaluated and chosen wherever AI is shaping the decision.

Andrew Warden, Global Vice President of Marketing and CMO of Semrush, An Adobe Company

UK AI Answers Rely More Heavily on News

One of the clearest differences in the Index is the role that news and information publishers play across the two regions.  In the UK, news publishers play a more dominant role in AI answers. On ChatGPT, news sites accounted for an average 29.5% of citations among the 100 most-cited UK domains, against 19.6% in the US. On Gemini, news was the leading UK source category in every month, at between 16.6% and 23.0% of top-100 citations. On ChatGPT, trip-planning sites and online marketplaces follow news in the UK, while online learning and streaming platforms follow it in the US.
For brands, the findings reinforce the importance of third-party authority. AI visibility is shaped both  by what a company says about itself, and what others say about it:  publishers, marketplaces, communities and forums, and other independent sources. Those sources increasingly form part of the information layer AI systems use to answer user questions.

Being Mentioned Is Not the Same as Being Cited

The report also reinforces a central finding of the previous AI Visibility Index: being mentioned by an AI platform and being cited are two different forms of visibility. Averaged across 22 categories and four platforms, fewer than half of the top 100 mentioned brands also appear among the top 100 cited domains, in every month and in both markets. In the UK, average overlap across the study ranged from just 36.7 to 45.3 domains out of 100, depending on the month.
The gap can be substantial even between direct competitors. In the UK, Tesco and Asda both remained among the top 100 mentioned brands across all four platforms in every month studied. Yet in July, Tesco ranked as ChatGPT's 25th most-cited UK domain, while Asda ranked 606th. On Gemini, the same two brands were considerably closer, ranking 29th and 60th respectively for citations. The example demonstrates why marketers cannot treat brand visibility in LLMs as a single score. 

Additional AI Visibility Index Takeaways

Beyond the headline findings, the study reveals several important dynamics shaping how brands appear, compete, and build trust across AI-powered discovery environments:
  • Each platform creates a different visibility environment. Gemini mentions more distinct brands per answer than ChatGPT, while ChatGPT cites the most sources per answer and Gemini the fewest.
  • Google AI Overviews responses are particularly distinct. Across all seven months, brand mention overlap was consistently lowest in Google AI Overviews compared to the other three platforms. Its pairing with ChatGPT also has the lowest source overlap of any two platforms, in both markets.
  • UK visibility is more fragmented across platforms. A larger share of leading UK domains appears on only one AI platform, reinforcing the need to measure ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews independently rather than assuming performance on one has a correlating effect on others.
  • Source concentration varies dramatically by platform. In the UK, AI Mode's ten leading source domains accounted for between 23.2% and 35.8% of citations among its 10,000 most-cited UK domains across the seven months, compared with only 12.8% to 15.4% for ChatGPT.
  • Category matters as much as platform. The report finds meaningful differences between sectors including Real Estate, Finance, Industrial and Sports, requiring brands to benchmark themselves against the competitors and source ecosystem relevant to their own market and category rather than relying on a single global AI visibility benchmark.

Availability

The latest 2026 AI Visibility Index: Where the Top Brands Stand in the UK and US is available at https://ai-visibility-index.semrush.com/downloads/ai-visibility-index-2026-study-h2.

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