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Benchmarking the Future of AI Search: 2026 Insights on AEO & AI Overviews
AI is officially the new search frontier. Brands that don’t adapt risk being left out of the conversation. Which brands are gaining high visibility in AI search? How can you measure against and outperform competitor brands? 👈 Reserve your seat to see where your brand stands in the 2026 AI search race. In 2026, AI Overviews and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) define your visibility and your traffic. Knowing exactly what’s working for top-performing brands is key. Join Pat Reinhart, VP of Services & Thought Leadership at Conductor, and Shannon Vize, Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Conductor, for an exclusive first look at the 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report, the industry’s first comprehensive study on AI search performance across 10 industries. Learn What Counts As Winning In AI Search You’ll walk away with clear, data-backed insights to measure how your brand stacks up, using benchmarks that show where you lead, lag, and can grow in AI visibility, referral traffic, and share of voice. You’ll Learn: The exclusive 2026 benchmarks for AI referral traffic, AIO visibility, AEO, and GEO performance across 10 industries. How to identify where your brand stands against AI market share leaders. How AI search and AIO are transforming visibility and referral traffic. 🔍 Register now for the only data-driven benchmark report built to future-proof your SEO, AEO, and AI search strategy for 2026. 🛑 Can’t make it live? Register anyway! We’ll send you the full recording after the event.
Benchmarking the Future of AI Search: 2026 Insights on AEO & AI Overviews
- 2. Speakers Shannon Vize Sr. ContentMarketing Manager & Team Lead Conductor Patrick Reinhart VP of Services & Thought Leadership Conductor
- 3. What are thenew metrics and benchmarks for AI search and AI Overviews?
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- 8. For 2026, thequestion isn’t how to grow AI referral traffic; it’s how to grow brand visibility inside AI experiences. Referral traffic data is simply a signal of where discovery is shifting, not the goal itself. What does this data mean?
- 10. AI Search Market ShareLeaders by Domain Citations AEO / GEO
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Editor's Notes
- #2 Speaker: Pat then pass to Shannon Hi everyone! I’m Shannon, the Sr. Content Marketing Manager and Team lead at Conductor. I’ve been in content marketing for over a decade now.
- #3 Speaker: Shannon So, what are the new metrics and benchmarks for AI search and AI overviews? Search has changed — again. But this time, it’s significant. the benchmarks of success are not built around keywords or rankings. The new AI search benchmarks are about answers and whether or not your brand is showing up in them. AI Overviews and answer engines are now where discovery happens. Your customers are asking questions in new places — and the brands showing up in those AI responses are the ones shaping perception, trust, and market share. The 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks we’re walking you through today reveal what that new visibility looks like — and which brands are earning credibility in the age of AI search. Before we dive in though, let’s take a quick poll to assess the metrics folks are using so far to assess AEO/GEO success: *POLL QUESTION #1* Which metric do you consider most valuable in measuring AEO/GEO success for your organization? Brand mentions Domain citations Overall AI search market share (visibility) AI referral traffic Conversions/leads attributed to AI search Unsure / still assessing
- #4 Speaker: Shannon A quick rundown on the methodology behind the benchmarks report and the data we are about to show you: Using Conductor, we analyzed 13,770 domains from leading brands. Each domain was categorized into 10 industries and 22 subindustries, which map directly to the Global Industry Classification Standard. The AI search market share leaders are sourced from an analysis of those domains being cited against Conductor’s index of 3.5 million unique prompts between May and September 2025. The analysis included 17 million AI-generated responses and over 100 million citations sourced from our AI Search Performance (AISP) and AIO reporting index. The findings on AI search traffic, organic Google traffic, and referral traffic by answer engine type were sourced by analyzing anonymized and aggregated traffic patterns across 1,215 of our enterprise customer domains to assess how users of answer engines are reaching websites. Ultimately, we analyzed more than 3.3 billion sessions across all of our data sources. Let’s dive in.
- #5 Speaker: Shannon to provide context then pass to Pat Top insights: AI referral traffic accounts for 1.08% of all website traffic for these 10 key industries. The IT (2.80%) and Consumer Staples (1.91%) industries had the highest amount of AI referral traffic. The Communication Services (.25%) and Utilities (.35%) industries had the lowest amount of AI referral traffic. Overall, AI referral traffic makes up 1.08% of all website traffic across the 10 industries we analyzed. For reference, that translates to 1 out of 100 website visits coming from users referred by an LLM or answer engine. While AI referral traffic remains small in volume, its impact on visibility is outsized. That 1% of AI referral traffic represents millions of interactions happening before a user visits a website. These moments decide which brands show up in the new customer journey—and which are invisible. Additionally, users who leverage AI search tend to have higher intent and are more likely to convert than traffic from traditional channels, according to recent studies and insights from leading brands: “Across our clients, Knotch’s audience journey tracking shows that visitors referred directly from LLMs convert at twice the rate and in one-third the number of sessions compared to other site traffic sources. While this traffic still represents a small but growing share, it’s clear that LLMs are driving a new kind of consumer behavior and brands need to adapt their content and site experiences to capitalize on this emerging, high-intent audience.” - Andrew Bolton, CCO at Knotch The differences in AI referral traffic rates between industries are interesting. The reason that IT drives so much more traffic than the other industries could be due to the fact that IT queries aren’t always easy or quick fixes, making users more likely to click a link from a generative answer and learn more about their particular issue. In addition, the Consumer Staples section can often have a lot of how-to guides, recipes, and informational content that a user may need deeper insights into.
- #6 Speaker: Pat then Shannon (banter) Top insights: On average, AI referral traffic increased every month in 4 of the 10 industries we analyzed. We saw some volatility in the rate of growth month-over-month by industry. Some sectors, like Consumer Discretionary (+.21%) and Communication Services (+.12%), saw steady increases in their growth rate since May. Other sectors, like Utilities (-.28%) and Health Care (-.34%), saw their rate of growth slow from May to September 2025. Quote: "When you see fractional percentages like this, it should make you take a deep breath and recognize that this isn't going to move as fast as the doomsday commenters believe. Recognize that you have time to formulate a thoughtful strategy around this and that it’s not going to decimate your short-term plans, but also that this will grow over time and eventually ruin your long-term plans if you don't account for it." - Pat Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor As you can tell, we’re talking about very small percentages here. But on the whole, we’re seeing growth MoM across a majority of these 10 industries over a five-month period.
- #7 Speaker: Pat then Shannon (banter) Top insights: Established channels like organic search, paid, direct, social, and any other referral traffic aside from AI still drive the vast majority of website visits across all industries. Organic search traffic remains a key traffic pillar, particularly in sectors like Health Care (42.4%), Communication Services (39.6%), and Industrials (33.8%). This data underscores the continued importance of a strong traditional SEO strategy. Even with the rise of AI search, optimizing for visibility in the traditional Google search experience, including AI-generated result types like AI Overviews, remains essential for improving brand visibility and relevance. Quote: "If you're looking at this and saying to yourself, ‘I can't believe it,’ then you're in the wrong profession and/or you're in the wrong subreddit, listening to the wrong people. Organic search will continue to be a cornerstone of most digital campaigns for the foreseeable future, but, as it always has, it will change, and you will need to be flexible and adapt your strategy as the landscape morphs around you." - Pat Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor This overlap and the high share of organic traffic across a majority of industries reinforce the need for a dual approach of traditional SEO and AEO / GEO strategies.
- #8 Speaker: Shannon then to Pat to add any additional commentary [Read the slide] then go to points below: AI hasn’t replaced search—it’s replaced your website as the first touchpoint. The brands showing up in AI answers today are shaping the new customer journey. The journey doesn’t start with a click anymore. It starts — and often ends — inside an AI-generated answer. Think about your own user experience in answer engines. For me, I ask a question, get an answer and evaluate those answers - sometimes cross-referencing in other places. But a lot of the time, I get the answer I need and then type in the website I want to go to to make my purchase. In this example, there is no direct referral from AI -> instead, I trust those responses and navigate directly where I need to. This reflects the new customer journey and why it’s key to be showing up in AI search. It’s difficult as we can’t rely on core metrics as proof points, but the proof will be in the increased conversions and revenue as you increase citations/mentions. If your brand isn’t visible there, you’re not just missing traffic — you’re absent from the modern customer journey.
- #9 Speaker: Pat then Shannon (banter) Top insights: On average, 87.4% of all AI referral traffic across these 10 key industries comes from ChatGPT. Interestingly, Gemini drove a significantly high share of AI traffic (21%) to the Utilities industry. This highlights why focusing on brand performance on ChatGPT alone isn’t enough. Some industries are seeing other AI engine traffic sources gain significant market share. The key takeaway from our analysis of AI referral traffic by answer engines is that ChatGPT dominates the landscape right now. That said, ChatGPT may dominate AI referrals today, but the ecosystem is evolving fast. Winning brands won’t chase engines—they’ll future-proof their presence across every generative surface. Quote: "ChatGPT is the Google of AI search, so this data should not be surprising to anyone. This also proves that history repeats itself and that you don't need a separate strategy for each individual LLM. Instead, it’s like back in the day with Google vs. Bing, you need a holistic approach to your brand's visibility that will benefit you across all LLMs and traditional search engines." - Pat Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor [Pro Tip] Brands looking to future-proof AI search visibility should invest in an enterprise AEO platform that measures performance across a majority of answer engines and provides intelligent optimization recommendations. Perplexity accounted for the next highest referral traffic share overall, although there were some differences on an industry-specific basis. Specifically, Gemini and Copilot drove a larger percentage of traffic in certain sectors. For example, Gemini drove 21% of AI traffic to the Utilities industry, while Copilot accounted for 5% of traffic in the Financials industry, which was the second highest behind ChatGPT. Quote: "Perplexity is the Bing of AI search. Pay attention and optimize for trends and insights around ChatGPT, and it will trickle down to all of the other ‘major’ LLMs." - Pat Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor
- #10 Speaker: Shannon This section is an analysis of the brands and domains that won the most market share based on the highest number of AI citations across our analysis of 17M AI-generated responses and 100M citations between May and September 2025. These results reflect the brands that had the highest AI visibility by industry during that time period. We’re only showing 4 of the 10 industries we analyzed, but you can access the full report via the link shared in the Handouts section. But first, let’s get a sense of how you all are tracking AI search market share / visibility *POLL QUESTION #2:* How are you currently tracking AI search market share/visibility for your brand? Siloed point solution (Example: Profound) Multiple tools Enterprise AEO/GEO platform (Example: Conductor) Manually Exploring tools but haven’t adopted one yet Not currently tracking
- #11 Speaker: Shannon then Pat (banter) Communications Services industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share youtube.com reddit.com google.com investopedia.com reuters.com The dominance of youtube.com highlights the high value AI models place on video content, frequently citing it as an authoritative source for visual how-to guides, explainers, and news clips. It’s important to note that while youtube.com is the domain that’s ranking, the video content itself comes from a wealth of different brands; YouTube is just the domain that gets the credit. So, it’s a great visibility play to ensure brand videos hosted on YouTube are optimized for AI and traditional search to take advantage of the channel’s leading market share. "Video content holding a prominent position in AI search should not be a surprise to anyone. One of the best ways to share your brand expertise is through video content. Host your content on YouTube and then embed it across multiple platforms." - Pat Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor Reddit.com's strong showing signals that AI models are sourcing real-world, anecdotal answers from forums to provide insights on authentic user experiences and troubleshooting advice. Responses based on Reddit replies are often more direct and specific than the content found on traditional corporate websites.
- #12 Speaker: Pat & Shannon (banter) Consumer Discretionary industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share clemson.edu walmart.com target.com fourseasons.com cornell.edu Clemson.edu earned the highest market share of all cited domain leaders for the industry, with nearly double the market share compared to the next two higher education domain leaders (cornell.edu and harvard.edu). Clemson’s strong showing was in part driven by a new AI visibility-focused content strategy, involving AI-powered topic research, strategic content prioritization, AI-assisted content creation, and more. These efforts resulted in Clemson capturing 91% AIO market share, along with increased AI citations and brand mentions in answer engines, which they achieved by leveraging Conductor. The presence of major retailers, such as Walmart.com and Target.com, is expected, as they are cited for a massive range of product information and availability. They’re also widely recognized and authoritative domains that AI will be more likely to cite than lesser-known sites.
- #13 Speaker: Pat & Shannon (banter) Financials industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share nerdwallet.com bankrate.com kiplinger.com vanguard.com experian.com This list is dominated by financial publishers and comparison sites, not traditional banks. Nerdwallet.com and bankrate.com likely lead because they have massive libraries of high-quality, long-form content that directly answers complex your money or your life (YMYL) questions. AI models are often trained to prioritize these types of authoritative and educational sources when providing financial definitions and advice. Quote: "This insight is WILD because these sites have struggled in traditional search since the advent of AI, with steep declines in visibility in favor of actual financial institutions and a devaluation of what I classify as content hubs and aggregators. I believe sites like NerdWallet and Bankrate will experience struggles as LLMs recognize and surface actual financial institutions vs. aggregator sites that lead you to said financial institution. Time will tell." - Pat Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor
- #14 Speaker: Pat & Shannon (banter) Health Care industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share mayoclinic.org clevelandclinic.org healthline.com goodrx.com webmd.com This list is dominated by top-tier medical institutions and trusted health publishers. As another YMYL category, AI models are heavily weighted to prioritize sources with the highest level of expertise and authority. Mayoclinic.org and clevelandclinic.org likely lead because they are world-renowned hospital systems, and healthline.com and webmd.com are massive repositories of expert medical information.
- #15 Speaker: Shannon AI Overview benchmarks data Despite the rise of AI answer engines, billions of daily searches still take place on the world’s most popular traditional search engine: Google. But AI disruption has come for this search surface, too, as AI Overview (AIO) results—AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some Google search results pages—are appearing for more searches every day, which means that users are getting their answers directly from AIO results rather than scrolling further to see the standard top-ranked content on page 1. As a result, it’s essential for brands to optimize their site and content to increase their chances of winning an AIO result and getting seen where it matters most. AIO methodology We analyzed AI Overview data in the U.S. over a 4-week period from September 15 through October 12, 2025, to get a sense of how AI-powered search is impacting Google’s search experience. To do so, we analyzed approximately 21.9 million unique Google searches from Conductor’s traditional search index. Of those Google searches, nearly 5.5 million generated an AIO result.
- #16 Speaker: Shannon then Pat Top insights Our analysis shows that while each industry is seeing some kind of AI Overview presence within search results, the percentage of queries generating AI Overview results varies significantly between industries. Of the 21.9M Google searches we analyzed, 5.5M generated an AIO result (25.11%), so just over one quarter of the analyzed Google searches trigger an AIO result. The industries with the highest percentage of AIO results are Health Care (48.7%), Financials (25.7%), and Utilities (25.4%). It seems that AIO results are being generated more often for YMYL categories and more complex queries. The industries with the lowest percentage of AIO results are Real Estate (4.4%) and Consumer Staples (6.8%). AI-generated responses aren’t being leveraged for transactional or more localized queries. That’s why we saw comparatively few AIO results in the Real Estate and Consumer Staples industries.
- #17 Speaker: Pat / Shannon (banter) In our analysis, we broke down the frequency of AIO results based on page type across all 10 of the analyzed industries. Specifically, we wanted to see what types of content—blogs, videos, Wikipedia pages, product pages, etc.—were cited most often in AI Overviews. We found that these five page types were most likely to be cited in AIO results: Blog content Video content Article content News content Product pages This tracks with what we know about AI Overviews. Generally, AIO is leveraged to break down complex and informational topics into more digestible summaries. It makes sense that longer-form content like blogs, articles, and videos would be summarized in an AI overview. Quote: "While this isn’t a groundbreaking insight, it’s data-driven confirmation that you need to continue to create high-quality content in these areas, and it will help you show up more in AI search, just like it helps you show up in traditional search. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, you need to make the wheel bigger—by creating more content in more places—and faster—by creating agility in your organization." - Pat Reinhart, VP, Services and Thought Leadership, Conductor
- #18 Speaker: Pat/Shannon REMIND AUDIENCE: The full 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report with all 10 industry is linked in the Handouts section. No email or form fill needed! Additionally, for more granular insights, we also produced 8 industry-specific benchmarks reports which go into more detail on the subindustry market share leaders, along with some other valuable subindustry insights. We’ll drop those in the Handouts section now as well.