89% Of AI Search Demand Has No Clear Owner: Use This Before The Window Closes via @sejournal, @gregjarboe
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What's Actually Driving Traffic Now. 🔥SEJ Pro Course: Own Your Brand’s Promo Code & Coupon Search Results Before Parasites Do Data across 1,094 categories shows topical authority holds in ChatGPT, but 89% of AI search demand still sits in categories no brand owns. VIP CONTRIBUTOR Greg Jarboe July 29, 2026 ⋅ 6 min read VIP CONTRIBUTOR Greg Jarboe President and co-founder at SEO-PR Bio Follow 842 READS Kevin Indig just settled an argument that’s been running in half-finished form since AI Overviews launched. Does topical authority that rewards brands for going deep on a subject instead of wide, actually carry over into AI search? Or is ChatGPT enough of a blank slate that a generalist brand can walk in and grab a category cold? Indig got access to six months (January-June 2026) of ChatGPT answers data from Semrush, spanning 1,094 U.S. categories, five prompts per category, more than 50,000 brands, and over 600,000 citations. He published the breakdown in his Growth Memo Substack on July 20, with the headline finding on LinkedIn the same day. His answer is that topical authority does matter in AI search, and the reason is durability. Once a brand earns an outsized share of mentions in a category, it tends to hold onto it. That’s the tidy version. The messier and more useful version, buried a few paragraphs into his post, is that almost none of the market has settled yet. Indig built three buckets. A category has a clear owner when one brand shows up in at least four of five test prompts and beats the runner-up by five percentage points or more. It’s an emerging leader when a brand leads at least three prompts without hitting that gap. Everything else, meaning no brand leads even three of five prompts, counts as unsettled. Run those definitions across the full dataset, and June 2026 looks wide open. Only 15.2% of categories had a clear owner. Just over half, 53.7%, were open fields with multiple credible contenders and no brand close to locking the door. Indig ranked all 1,094 categories by estimated AI search volume and split them into two even groups. The higher-volume half accounts for 98% of all AI search demand in the sample, and it has the lower owner rate of the two, 11.3% versus 19% for the lower-volume half. Stack that up and 89.3% of estimated AI search demand sits inside categories with no clear owner yet. The categories worth the most money to occupy are, right now, the least decided. I’ve spent the past three years watching SEOs debate whether topical authority is a real algorithmic force or a convenient story agencies tell clients to justify a content calendar. Indig’s data is the first thing I’ve seen that actually resolves the question with a real number. Topical authority is real in AI search, and the brands still treating category focus as optional are giving away nine-figure categories to whoever bothers to show up consistently across all five prompt types. The second half of Indig’s analysis is where the strategy gets sharper. He tracked month-over-month leadership changes across the same categories and found that a clear owner held first place in 90.4% of comparisons. The switches that did happen were concentrated almost entirely in categories where the lead was already thin. Categories where the leader changed had a median lead of just 1.3 percentage points going into the switch. Categories where the leader held on had a median lead more than double that, 2.9 points. Growth trajectory told Indig almost nothing on its own. He shows three examples where a leading brand trended upward month over month and still got overtaken, because a competitor simply grew faster or closed a narrow gap. The lesson isn’t that momentum is meaningless. It’s that a one- or two-point lead is not a lead worth defending yet, and a brand sitting in that range should assume it’s still in a fight. Indig also found something that undercuts a common assumption about how ownership gets built. Citations and brand mentions turned out to be only weakly related, with a slightly negative correlation of -0.229. The most frequently cited domain in a category was rarely the same as the most frequently mentioned brand, matching up only 20.8% of the time. But the most mentioned brand was cited at least once 69.9% of the time. Getting cited a lot doesn’t automatically make you the brand ChatGPT reaches for by default. That’s a meaningful distinction for anyone whose GEO strategy currently starts and ends with “get more citations.” Owners did share some traits versus their runner-up: higher branded search volume in 55.7% of pairs, higher organic traffic in 48.4%, and a higher Semrush Authority Score in 52.5%. Indig is careful to call these correlations rather than a formula. A brand doesn’t earn ChatGPT’s default answer by buying branded search volume. It earns it by being the source ChatGPT’s training and retrieval keep landing on when the model tries to answer all five variations of a question, the definition, the comparison, the alternatives list, the use case, and the buying decision. Here’s where I’d point a practitioner’s next quarter of work, adapted from Indig’s framework and my own Citation Share of Voice approach to tracking AI mentions. The GEO conversation over the past year has fixated almost entirely on citation counts because citations are the easiest thing to drop into a dashboard. Indig’s data says citations are a door, not the room. Practitioners who keep optimizing for the door while a competitor optimizes for being the name ChatGPT actually says out loud are going to lose categories they thought they were winning. The window Indig describes won’t stay open. Eighty-nine percent of demand sitting in unsettled categories is an unusually generous head start, and the brands that move on it in the next few quarters, rather than treating this as one more report to bookmark, are the ones that will still be the default answer when somebody runs this same study in 2027. Read Full Bio VIP CONTRIBUTOR Greg Jarboe President and co-founder at SEO-PR Before Greg Jarboe retired, he was the president of SEO-PR, which he co-founded with Jamie O’Donnell, from 2003 to 2025. ... Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. 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Source: Search Engine Journal
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