AI Commerce ecommerce

AI can name your brand without ever reading your website

Being named in an AI answer and being used as its source are two different wins, and this week's research shows how often they come apart. If you're checking how your store shows up in ChatGPT or Google's AI answers, look at both.

One thing this week: mentions and citations are not the same

A mention is when the AI names your brand in its answer. A citation is when it links to your website, or another page, as the place it got its information from. You'd expect the two to go together. Mostly they don't.

Semrush, the SEO software company, has released its latest AI Visibility Index, and for the first time it covers the UK as well as the US. It looked at ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, the AI summary at the top of some Google results. It measured each one monthly from January to July this year.

The headline is simple. Fewer than half of the 100 brands AI named most often were also among the 100 websites it cited most. That held in every month and in both countries. On ChatGPT the overlap was lowest, at roughly a third, according to PPC Land's write-up of the report.

Their best example is two UK supermarkets. In July, Tesco was the 25th most-cited website on ChatGPT. Asda was 606th. Both were in the top 100 for being named, on all four AI platforms.

So an AI can happily recommend a brand while getting its facts about that brand from somewhere else. A review site, a news story, a marketplace listing. That's fine when those pages are right. It's a problem when they're out of date, or when they belong to a competitor.

Two other findings are worth knowing. The platforms behave quite differently: ChatGPT lists a long string of sources per answer, Gemini only a handful. And the UK looked noticeably different from the US, with less agreement between platforms on which brands and sources come up.

We'd read this with some care. Semrush sells AI visibility tracking, the full report sits behind a sign-up form, and each month was measured on its own, so the ranges aren't trends. Claude, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot weren't included. And there's no New Zealand data at all.

That last point matters most to us. If the UK can look this different from the US, we wouldn't assume a US benchmark tells you much about a store in Hamilton or Christchurch.

Here's what we recommend. When you check your own brand in ChatGPT or Gemini, don't stop at "did it name us?". Look at the sources it lists underneath. Are they your website, a review page you know about, or something you'd rather it didn't use? Try the same question in two or three AI tools, on a few different days, and expect different answers. That's normal.

If the sources are wrong or thin, the fix is usually unglamorous. Clear product pages with the details people ask about, and a few honest mentions on sites your customers already trust.

What we're watching

The report also found news sites carry a large share of ChatGPT's sources in the UK. That fits other vendor data we've seen on the value of being covered in the media. It measures something different, though, so for now it's a lead rather than a finding.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on which pages AI is actually reading about your store, we're happy to take a look.