Consumers are increasingly asking tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode questions they once typed into a traditional search engine: What’s the best option for this? Who provides this service near me? Which companies should I consider?
And that raises an important question for businesses: How does AI decide which companies to mention or recommend?
New research from Semrush offers an interesting look at the answer. Its AI Visibility Index Mini Study compared millions of responses and citations across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. One of the clearest takeaways is that AI visibility extends well beyond your company website.
Your Website Is Important, But It’s Only Part of the Picture
When an AI platform answers a question, it can draw information and signals from sources across the web.
In the Semrush study, ChatGPT relied heavily on community and reference sources, including Reddit and Wikipedia. Google AI Mode leaned much more heavily into social and video sources, including YouTube and Facebook. In fact, approximately 59% of ChatGPT citations came from community and reference sources, while nearly half of Google AI Mode citations came from social and video.
That means a strong website remains important, but businesses also need to think about their overall digital footprint.
What do review sites say about you? Are your business listings accurate and consistent? Are other credible websites talking about your company? Do you have an active social presence? Are you represented on the platforms and industry resources your customers trust?
Increasingly, all of those things can contribute to how well AI understands your business.
Being Mentioned and Being Cited Aren’t the Same Thing
One of the more interesting findings in the Semrush study is the distinction between an AI platform mentioning a brand and citing that brand’s website as its source.
The two don’t necessarily go together.
A brand may appear frequently in AI answers while information about it is being gathered or supported by completely different websites. Semrush found only about 55% overlap between ChatGPT’s most-mentioned brands and its most-cited sources.
For businesses, that’s an important shift in thinking.
Online visibility isn’t only about getting people, or AI, to your website. It’s also about establishing enough credibility and authority across the web that your business becomes part of the conversation.
AI Is Also Comparing You to Your Competitors
Semrush calls this the “Consideration Set.”
When AI discusses a particular company, it often associates that company with a recurring group of competitors. In the study’s PayPal example, ChatGPT frequently mentioned Apple Pay, Venmo and Stripe alongside PayPal.
For a local or regional business, the same concept raises some interesting questions.
If someone asks ChatGPT to recommend companies that provide your service in your market, which businesses does it suggest?
Are you one of them?
And perhaps just as importantly, which competitors consistently appear alongside you or instead of you?
Those are becoming valuable questions for marketers to monitor alongside traditional search rankings.
There Is No Universal Formula for AI Visibility
Another important finding from the study is that different AI platforms don’t necessarily rely on the same sources.
Semrush found a 69% overlap between the brands mentioned by ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. But the platforms showed considerably different preferences when it came to the sources they cited.
Those preferences also varied considerably by industry.
For example, the study found Google AI Mode relied heavily on Yelp within the food and beverage category, while YouTube was particularly dominant in arts and entertainment. Other categories had a much broader mix of influential sources.
That’s why businesses should be cautious about any promise of a simple formula for “ranking in ChatGPT.”
The right strategy depends on your business, your industry, your competitors and where credible information about companies like yours lives online.
So, What Should Businesses Be Doing?
The good news is that preparing for AI search doesn’t mean abandoning everything businesses have been doing to build digital visibility.
In many ways, it means doing those things more strategically and more cohesively.
A strong approach includes:
- Maintaining a useful, technically sound website with clear information about your company, services and expertise
- Publishing helpful content that demonstrates knowledge and answers the questions customers actually ask
- Building and maintaining accurate business listings and profiles
- Generating authentic customer reviews
- Creating an active, credible presence on relevant social and video platforms
- Pursuing mentions, links and coverage from reputable third-party websites and industry resources
- Understanding which sources carry the most influence within your particular industry
- Monitoring which competitors appear when AI answers questions related to your products or services
The goal isn’t simply to optimize a webpage for another algorithm.
It’s to build a digital presence that makes it easy for search engines, AI platforms and people to understand who you are, what you do and why your business deserves consideration.
Search Is Changing. Good Marketing Still Matters.
Perhaps that’s the most encouraging takeaway.
AI may be changing how people discover businesses, but many of the fundamentals haven’t changed at all. Businesses still need to be credible. They need useful content. They need positive customer experiences. They need visibility in the places their audiences spend time. And they need other credible sources to recognize their expertise.
What’s changing is how all of those signals are being connected.
As AI becomes a bigger part of how customers research products, services and companies, businesses that invest in a strong, diverse digital presence will be better positioned to be found, understood and considered.
Because the future of search may not be about ranking first. It may be about making sure your business is part of the answer.
