Headline findings

  • Concentration is the rule. Across industries, the three most-named brands capture a median 62% of all brand mentions in category prompts. AI answers are a winner-take-most surface.
  • Engines disagree more than expected. The brand most-named by one engine was also top on a second engine in only about half of industry runs — engine-specific source graphs produce genuinely different winners.
  • Third-party sources do the talking. In B2B categories, the majority of cited URLs were directories, review platforms and trade media — not vendor sites. Your own domain is necessary, not sufficient.
  • Freshness shows. Engines with live retrieval (Perplexity, ChatGPT search) cited recently-updated pages disproportionately; slow-refresh answers leaned on older directory content.

Method (published in full)

  1. Prompt sets: 30 per industry — 20% head, 40% mid-tail with constraints, 40% long-tail situational. Harvested from community threads and sales-language patterns, not brainstormed.
  2. Sampling: 3 fresh-session runs per prompt per engine; majority scoring for mentions and sentiment.
  3. Engines: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT (search-enabled), Perplexity, Gemini. Copilot, Claude and Grok were sampled in a smaller pilot and excluded from headline figures for sample-size reasons.
  4. Period: runs executed October 2026.

Limitations (stated, not buried)

Read before citing: (1) AI answers are probabilistic and personalized — our three-run majority mitigates but does not eliminate variance. (2) English-language prompts only; results do not transfer to other languages. (3) Six industries is a sample, not the economy. (4) We are a GEO services firm publishing GEO data — the methodology is open precisely so you can check our incentives against our arithmetic.

Use the benchmark

Cite it as "ChinaGEO State of GEO, Q4 2026". Better: run the same protocol on your category — the methodology is open, and the Checker runs a lightweight version on your brand free.

Frequently asked questions

What is the single most actionable benchmark finding?
That third-party sources dominate citations in B2B categories. The fastest visibility gains come from correcting and completing directory, review and trade-media presence — before writing another word on your own site.
Why are only four engines in the headline figures?
Sample discipline. Copilot, Claude and Grok were run in a smaller pilot; rather than pad the headline with thin samples, we report four engines at full protocol and flag the rest as directional.