Victorious said (via Search Engine Journal) its Q2 2026 Quarterly Search Report found that AI platforms accurately described 96% of tested brands when asked directly, but 89% of brands never appeared in category research answers.
The study covered 175 brands across legal, healthcare, SaaS, financial services, and ecommerce and retail, with 140 brands included in the recognition analysis and 150 in the mention-rate cohort, according to Victorious.
Victorious said it tested eight AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Meta AI. It graded direct brand-description responses against each brand’s own website as correct, vague, outdated, wrong, or not recognized.
Recognition and mentions diverged across the platforms, the report said. Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot each exceeded 83% accuracy in every vertical tested, while Perplexity recognized fewer than 55% of SaaS and ecommerce brands and Meta AI recognized 46% of SaaS brands.
Victorious said the strongest links to AI mentions came from signals beyond a brand’s own website. Referring domains and third-party web mentions showed moderate correlation with AI mentions, at 0.49 and 0.45 respectively, on a scale where 1.0 would indicate a perfect relationship.
High-authority links on their own did not materially improve mention rates, according to post-publication testing by Victorious. The report said some brands with links from highly authoritative sites still rarely appeared in AI answers.
Victorious said brands with fewer than 2,000 indexed web pages mentioning them were named in AI answers 3% of the time. Mention rates rose sharply above that level, according to the report.
The report also found that 99.99% of 49,391 citations in category research prompts pointed to third-party websites rather than the brand’s own domain. Only four of the 150 brands in the mention cohort received a citation to their own website, Victorious said.
Problem awareness prompts drew citations from educational sources such as videos, government and institutional sites, professional communities, and educational content on company websites, according to the report. Even so, brands themselves were named in only 0.10% of those answers.
Category research prompts shifted citations toward directories and comparison sites, and brands were named more than 12 times as often in those answers, Victorious said.
Citation patterns also varied by industry, with legal services concentrated in a small number of prestige directories and SaaS citations spread across more than 10,000 domains, according to the report.
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