Being named by an AI assistant and being cited by it are two different results. New data from Semrush shows how far apart they are.
The company's AI Visibility Index 2026, reported by TechRound on October 13, tracked brand mentions and source citations every month across four answer engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. It covered 22 industries in the UK and the US. The headline finding should worry anyone who measures AI visibility by counting how often their name comes up.
The numbers
On average, fewer than half of the 100 most-mentioned brands were also among the 100 most-cited domains. The engines talk about these brands constantly, but they back up what they say with pages written by other people.
It gets sharper at the answer level. Only 13% of branded AI answers linked to the brand's official website. In the other 87%, the answer named the brand and then sent the reader somewhere else to check it.
Famous brands, cited elsewhere
The examples are big names. In the US, Chevrolet, Disney, Ford, Honda, Marvel, Nintendo and Toyota were in the top 100 for mentions on all four platforms in every month measured. Every one of them sat outside the top 500 for citations, every month.
In the UK, Tesco and Asda were in the top 100 for mentions on all four engines every month. In July, Tesco ranked 25th for ChatGPT citations and Asda ranked 606th. On Gemini the two sat at 29th and 60th. Both grocers are named about equally often, but they differ hugely in how often their own pages are used as evidence.
Where the citations go instead
Semrush's Leigh McKenzie described the split simply. A mention shows whether an engine is recommending or discussing your brand. A citation shows which sources it relies on to support the answer. Those sources, he said, come from a broad ecosystem of publishers, review sites, communities and other third parties.
This matches other research from the same week. Seer Interactive's work, featured by Forbes on October 12, found that third-party review sites are among the top citation sources on many AI platforms. Sourcelift's holiday-shopping test on October 5 found that 72% of answers with sources didn't cite a single brand's own site.
So the page that decides how an engine describes you is often a G2 listing, a Reddit thread, a comparison article or a trade publication. It isn't your homepage.
Every engine is different
The index also found the engines disagree with each other. In the UK, any two platforms shared only 63 to 70 of their top 100 mentioned brands. Gemini tends to name more distinct brands per response, and ChatGPT cites more external sources.
That means a brand can do well on one engine and be missing from another. Testing only ChatGPT leaves out a big part of where buyers are asking questions.
Why this matters more for B2B
Consumer giants can afford to lose citations, because everyone already knows Toyota. A B2B startup can't. When a buyer asks an assistant for the best tools in a category, the cited sources shape the shortlist: whoever wrote the comparison, whichever review site has the most complete profile, and whichever forum thread the engine trusts. If your own pages aren't in that set, you're relying on strangers to describe you correctly. Often they aren't describing you at all.
There's also a measurement trap here. A dashboard that counts mentions can look healthy while the real shortlist is built from a competitor's comparison page. Mentions show whether you were named. Citations show who controls the description.
The bigger picture
The practical work is in two places. First, make your own pages worth citing: specific claims, current facts, and pages that answer the questions buyers actually ask. Second, look after the third-party pages the engines already trust, because those pages answer for you when your own don't. You can only tell which matters more for your category by asking the buyer questions on each engine and reading what gets cited.
ClawWorld runs AI visibility work for B2B startups. Start with a free baseline report: 10 buyer questions, who ChatGPT and Claude name instead of you, and the pages they cite.