Original research · 2026 edition

State of GEO 2026: who shows up when AI answers.

We probed ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews with 1,800 commercial prompts across 18 sectors to map who gets cited, who gets paraphrased and who simply disappears from the answer layer.

4
Generative engines tested
1,800
Prompts evaluated
18
Sectors
12 mo
Longitudinal data
Findings

What the data shows in 2026

A few headlines from the full report.

  • Citation overlap

    Only 28% of cited domains appear across two or more generative engines.

  • Brand vs publisher weight

    Publishers still dominate informational answers, but brands win comparative ones.

  • Geographic bias

    Spanish-speaking markets are systematically under-represented in English answers.

  • Answer freshness

    Median age of cited content dropped from 14 months in 2025 to 6 months in 2026.