Brands chasing visibility inside ChatGPT are optimizing for a prize that, in most categories, does not exist yet. A Semrush study published July 20, built with Kevin Indig of Growth Memo, tracked 1,094 U.S. product and service categories in ChatGPT from January through June 2026, running five representative buyer prompts (definitions, comparisons, alternatives, use cases, and purchase decisions) against each one every month. The dataset covered more than 220,000 domains, 50,000 brands, and 600,000 citations. The result: only 15.2% of categories had a clear brand leader, defined as a brand appearing in at least four of five prompts with a meaningful lead. Another 31.2% had an emerging leader without a durable margin, and 53.7% had no consistent leader at all. High-demand categories were even less settled, with clear ownership in just 11.3% of them.
The study also undercuts a common assumption about how to win the AI-answer slot. Traditional SEO signals, branded search volume, organic traffic, and Authority Score, all correlated only moderately with category ownership in ChatGPT, none topping 56%. Kevin Indig framed the finding as a caution against over-claiming: “Treat that as a hypothesis, not a finding. What the data actually shows is: traditional SEO metrics aren’t enough to explain who owns a topic.”
The original insight for marketers: in the more than half of categories with no consistent leader, the opportunity is not defensive, it is a genuinely open contest, and the 90.4% month-over-month retention rate among categories that do have a settled leader suggests that whoever establishes ownership first in an unsettled category is likely to keep it. That makes AI-answer visibility tracking, already central to work like Profound’s brand-accuracy scoring for AI answer engines and the shift Gartner has documented toward third-party AI over branded chatbots, a near-term budget decision rather than a long-term experiment for any brand in an unsettled category.
Source: Semrush
