#ai-search

Business websites accounted for nearly 60% of Gemini’s citations in local AI search, according to a new study. Steady Demand’s analysis of 14,472 citations from 1,487 local search queries across 50 U.S. metro areas also found that identical searches often produced different AI recommendations.

Business websites beat directories. Nearly 60% of Gemini’s citations pointed directly to businesses’ own websites.

WordPress’s survey found 74% of enterprise decision-makers say AI discoverability is a priority, yet only 17% name their owned website as their top investment. The survey was conducted by Talker Research in April 2026 across 2,000 respondents, including 800 enterprise decision-makers and 1,200 U.S. adults.

Consumers do not just want visibility, they want proof. 86% seek out the original source after an AI summary.

Marketbridge and Meltwater announced a strategic partnership to drive innovation across the brand intelligence stack. The agreement gives go-to-market teams extended access to brand and narrative intelligence along with visibility into channels that support GTM activity and Generative Engine Optimization.

Marketbridge will integrate Meltwater narrative and GEO intelligence into its GTM intelligence, strategy, and content workflow.

A Semrush study of 1,094 U.S. categories found that only 15.2% had a clear brand leader in ChatGPT responses across five buyer prompts. The analysis defined a clear leader as a brand appearing in at least four of the five responses and leading the next competitor by at least five percentage points. This threshold was met in 166 categories.

Another 31.2% of categories showed an emerging leader that appeared in at least three prompts without a decisive margin.

Salesforce recently released a suite of B2B Commerce updates that includes a 24/7 Buyer Agent built directly into B2B Commerce on Agentforce. The updates add agentic commerce, intent-driven search, omni-channel buying, and headless extensibility.

The Buyer Agent lets customers find products, manage orders, and complete purchases through natural conversation on channels such as WhatsApp and SMS. It recommends products with rich visuals instead of plain text.

AI assistants answer questions, compare products, and recommend brands without sending users to websites. Success depends on whether AI systems can find, trust, and surface brands across the broader information ecosystem. Google has advanced Search to make experiences more conversational, multimodal, and persistent through AI Overviews.

The search ecosystem has moved away from reliance on traditional blue links.

A client reported that after Google’s May 2026 core update a flagship product page fell from position two to eight in traditional search results. The page retained sufficient ranking to appear in organic results, yet the brand was absent from answers generated by ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and other AI search engines.

BrightEdge data show that only 16.5% of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google’s organic top 10 for the same query.

10Fold surveyed 400 B2B technology marketing decision makers and found that 52% now rank AI-generated search and answer engines as their top content distribution channel.

The Visibility Reset: How AI Search Is Changing B2B Content Strategy report stated that AI-generated search and answer engines took the top slot from SEO. Search is no longer limited to traditional search engine results pages.

Sixty-five percent of Americans used AI search in the past six months, yet only 15% said they trust it a lot, according to research from Yelp cited in [MarTech](https://martech.org/can-marketers-navigate-ai-searchs-trust-cliff/). Consumers apply AI tools to compare products, research vendors, and narrow options despite the trust shortfall.

Parsnipp has launched an AI Search and GEO platform that models full buyer research journeys to measure brand visibility inside generative AI systems.

The Seattle-based company uses persona-based agents and multi-turn interactions rather than single-prompt testing. The platform covers brand analytics across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity, plus competitor tracking, prompt and citation analysis, GEO content optimization, search personas, and AI readiness recommendations.

Metadata already serves as the currency for organic search through schema markup, product-feed attributes, image descriptors, DAM tags, provenance signals, and taxonomies. According to [MarTech](https://martech.org/the-ai-marketing-advantage-hiding-in-your-metadata/), this structured data helps Google understand, index, and present content across Search, Images, and product experiences.

AI has elevated metadata from search optimization to the cornerstone of how brands are found, understood,...

SOCi and Google are hosting an exclusive webinar titled 'Winning the Next Era of Local Visibility' on June 3 to address how AI is changing local search dynamics. According to [MarTech](https://martech.org/winning-the-next-era-of-local-visibility-how-ai-is-changing-local-search/), AI-powered experiences such as Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Ask Maps are altering how customers discover local businesses, with people now asking more detailed, conversational questions that influence which...

Conductor, a provider of SEO and digital marketing software, announced AgentStack, a platform that enables brands to scale AI-driven search visibility using turnkey agents and custom workflows, as detailed in a recent report. This introduction includes a new enterprise suite of native Large Language Models (LLM) apps, developer infrastructure, and turnkey agents designed to help brands build, manage, and scale their presence across AI-driven search experiences.

AgentStack supports Answer...