AI search is finally catching up with reality – owning the topic matters in the battle for visibility
If a brand appears in an AI search result when someone asks a single question about them, that’s a win, right? Not necessarily. AI visibility to gather the leads for your sales funnel is more diffuse than that.
A new study from Semrush, based on more than 50,000 brands, 600,000 citations, and 1,094 topic categories tracked in ChatGPT over six months, suggests that AI visibility is less about winning individual prompts and more about owning an entire topic. Why?
Search platforms now build their answers from dozens of related questions at once. This means visibility is won or lost across a topic (think ‘ERP software’ or ‘Industrial AI’), not on a single query. That shift matters for B2B organizations that want to stay visible as AI changes how people search, research, and make purchase decisions.
The B2B companies that succeed in AEO will not be those that chase every new prompt but the ones that identify the subjects that matter to their audiences and build genuine authority around them.
AI search has finally caught up with reality! It’s what we call at IBA owning the theme, something we’ve always encouraged our clients to do!
Let’s delve further into three critical ways B2B marketing and PR pros can improve their AI search visibility strategies:
1. Most topics are still up for grabs
AI search has not yet created a fixed hierarchy of winners.
The Semrush study found that just 15.2% of the topics analyzed had a clear owner, defined as where one brand appears in at least 4 of 5 prompts with a 5-point lead. A further 31.2% had an emerging leader (in at least 3 prompts), while 53.7% remained unsettled (no brand appears in even 3 of 5 prompts). In other words, most topics are still contested.
That creates an opportunity for B2B companies to establish authority before a competitor does. But appearing once is not enough. The research defines a topic owner as a brand that appears across a number of related prompts, with a meaningful lead over its closest competitor.
AI visibility is not simply about getting a company’s name into one answer. It is about becoming a consistent part of the conversation around a subject.
2. Strong SEO does not automatically mean strong AI visibility
For years, brands have invested in the SEO fundamentals – building domain authority, organic traffic, and search visibility. These still matter but the Semrush data suggests they don’t tell the whole story when it comes to AI.
The study compared topic owners with their closest competitors across traditional SEO measures and showed that these broad metrics only aligned with topic ownership around half of the time.
A brand can have a strong website, significant traffic, and an established search presence – and still lose ground when an AI platform answers questions about a particular subject.
AI search draws on the wider information ecosystem around a topic. This means relevant content, expert commentary, third-party coverage, social media posts, and the associations that build credibility around a brand can all play a role in improving topic authority in ChatGPT.
The lesson is not to abandon SEO. But focus on building a deeper library of content and earning mentions in the multitude of sources AI answers cite for that specific subject.
3. Maintain topic leadership to become the brand AI can’t ignore
Once a company establishes a strong lead in a topic, it tends to keep it. The research found that clear topic owners retained first place in 90.4% of month-over-month comparisons in ChatGPT.
But there is a catch. The size of the lead matters. Emerging leaders and unsettled categories changed hands far more often, with the top brand switching in 1,950 of 5,470 comparisons.
For topics where the leader flipped, the median lead was just 1.3 percentage points. Whereas topics where the leader held its position, the median lead was 2.9 percentage points.
So being ahead is not enough. A narrow lead can disappear quickly, whereas a stronger position is much harder for a competitor to challenge.
The goal should not simply be to appear in AI search results today but rather to build enough authority around a topic, so that a brand becomes the obvious answer tomorrow, next month, and beyond.
Win AI search by owning what matters
ChatGPT is just one platform that makes up the wider AI search ecosystem but the Semrush study shows that marketing and PR pros must stop chasing prompts, start understanding and identifying their companies messaging, and start owning the themes that AEO will be sure to spot.
Hannah Watson is PR Lead – Analytics at IBA International.
