AI visibility is winner-take-all in some industries and wide open in others, and the gap is now measurable. In Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index, the top three brands held about 82.9% of News & Media visibility and 76.9% of Consumer Electronics, but only about 41.4% of Finance and 42.2% of Industrial. Your odds of being surfaced by an AI engine depend heavily on which of those two worlds your category lives in.
This is a dated reference, not a new dataset. Last reviewed: 31 July 2026. All figures come from Semrush's expanded 2026 AI Visibility Index (H1), an analysis of 126 million US AI-search prompts from January to April 2026 across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, published 26 June 2026. It is single-vendor, US-focused and covers four engines, so read the pattern as firmer than any one percentage and cite "Semrush, 2026 AI Visibility Index" with the date when you reuse a figure. This page reconciles with two earlier cuts of the same index in our corpus: how many sources AI engines cite and ghost citations: mentioned but not named.
How concentrated is AI visibility by industry?
Sharply, and it varies more by category than most brands assume. Semrush measured the share of a category's total AI visibility held by its three most-visible brands. The higher the share, the more the answers in that vertical are dominated by a handful of names:
| Vertical | Top-3 brands' share of category visibility | Read |
|---|---|---|
| News & Media | ~82.9% | Near winner-take-all |
| Consumer Electronics | ~76.9% | Highly concentrated |
| Industrial | ~42.2% | Open — room to climb |
| Finance | ~41.4% | Open — room to climb |
Source: Semrush, 2026 AI Visibility Index (126M US prompts, Jan–Apr 2026). In the two concentrated categories, three brands own roughly four-fifths of everything the engines say; in the two open ones, the same top three hold under half, leaving the rest of the field genuinely contestable. Semrush's own framing is that less concentrated categories "may offer greater opportunities for brands to gain visibility over time." The one-word summary: concentration is a property of your category, not of AI search as a whole.
Why do only 36 brands stay visible everywhere?
Because visibility rarely transfers across engines, so holding it on all of them at once is exceptionally rare. Semrush found only 36 brands, which it calls the Universal 36, kept top-100 visibility across all four platforms in every month of the study. The list skews to internet-scale entities:
- Named members include: YouTube, Google, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Walmart, Disney, Nintendo.
- What they share: enormous entity authority and constant third-party corroboration across the whole web, not a clever content trick.
- What it implies: for almost every other brand, visibility is engine-specific and must be earned and measured one engine at a time.
The Universal 36 are the exception that proves the rule. If fewer than three dozen brands on Earth are visible everywhere, then a strong showing on one engine tells you little about another, which is the same low-cross-engine-overlap finding we reconcile in do a few domains dominate AI citations. Chase the engines your buyers actually use, separately, rather than a mythical universal presence.
Isn't this the same as the citation-fingerprint data?
No, and keeping the two apart matters. Three different "concentration" questions get muddled constantly:
| Question | Metric | Where we cover it |
|---|---|---|
| Which brands dominate a vertical's answers? | Brand-visibility concentration (this page) | Semrush top-3 share |
| Which page types get cited in a vertical? | Citation fingerprint | Citation fingerprint by industry |
| Which domains do engines lean on overall? | Domain concentration | Domain-concentration reconciliation |
This page is about who wins a category, not what format or which domains win generally. A vertical can be brand-concentrated yet still cite a wide mix of page types, or vice versa. Read each metric for the decision it informs: brand concentration tells you how crowded the head of your category is; the fingerprint tells you what to publish; domain concentration tells you which third-party sources are worth earning. Conflating them produces confident but wrong strategy.
The useful question is not "is AI winner-take-all?" but "how concentrated is my category, and where is the open space within it?" An 80%-concentrated vertical and a 40%-concentrated one call for different plays, and the number is knowable before you spend a rupee on content.
Does a mention even count as visibility?
Not on its own, and the distinction sharpens in concentrated categories. Semrush noted that on Gemini specifically, the overlap between the brands an answer mentions and the domains it cites can be as low as 30% — a brand can be named without its own site being the source. Being mentioned inside a crowded category answer is worth far less than being the cited source, because a mention next to eight rivals is a footnote, while a citation is the recommendation. We unpack that gap in ghost citations: mentioned but not named. Track both, and weight citation over mention where the field is crowded.
What should you do with your category's concentration number?
Treat it as the first input to strategy, not a verdict. Concretely:
- Measure your own top-3 concentration before planning. The vertical averages above are directional; your specific prompt set may be more or less crowded. This is exactly what measuring AI visibility across many prompts and engines is for.
- In a concentrated category, go around the head. Head-on competition for the most-asked prompts against entrenched brands is slow. Long-tail sub-topics, specific comparisons, and earned placement in third-party sources are more winnable. The full playbook is in how to compete for AI visibility in a concentrated category.
- In an open category, climb the main prompts directly. Where the top three hold under half, entity strength and clean, citable pages can move you up the core questions, not just the fringes.
- Don't chase universal visibility. With only 36 brands visible everywhere, measure and win each engine separately rather than optimising for an impossible average.
- Refresh, because concentration moves. These are single-vendor figures from a four-month window; re-check as new editions land, on the same freshness cadence any competitive reference needs.
The published averages set the scene, but the number that governs your plan is your own category's concentration, measured across the prompts your buyers actually ask and tracked per engine over time. That per-category, per-engine visibility measurement is exactly what Buffy Intel is built to provide. Questions: [email protected].