Last updated June 2026
Most marketers want a single number: what percentage of AI answers should mention my brand? The question makes sense. The answer is more nuanced. AI share of voice benchmarks differ dramatically by vertical, by engine, and by intent type. A 20% citation rate is strong in cybersecurity. In healthcare information, you are competing with WebMD and the Mayo Clinic, and a 20% mention rate for a brand is exceptional.
This piece collects the best available per-vertical data, attributed to its sources with the caveats intact. Use it as a calibration tool, not a contract. The point is not to hit an industry average. The point is to know where you stand relative to the competitors you actually lose to, and to set a target that reflects what is achievable in your specific category.
The benchmark table: AI visibility by vertical (2026)
The table below covers six verticals. For each one, it shows three metrics:
- AI Overviews trigger rate: what share of queries in this category produce a Google AI Overview (the format that most often crowds out organic clicks).
- Typical brand mention rate: the approximate range of citation rates seen across brands that are actively present in a category, not the average across all brands including invisible ones.
- Zero-citation rate: the estimated share of brands in the category that receive zero mentions in AI-generated answers for their category’s core prompts.
Read the table with the attribution notes below it.
| Vertical | AI Overviews trigger rate | Typical brand mention rate (active brands) | Zero-citation rate | Source notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | ~51% of informational queries | 5–20% per brand for category prompts | Very high (most brands absent) | WebFX analysis of 130,000+ U.S. health queries, July 2025; BrightEdge reports 84–89% for all healthcare keyword types |
| B2B SaaS | ~48% of tracked queries (all types) | 10–35% for well-positioned vendors | High (market highly concentrated) | BrightEdge February 2026 estimate; Data-Mania LLC 2026 benchmarking research (single-vendor, undisclosed methodology) |
| Ecommerce | ~86.7% of commercial/buying-intent queries | Varies widely by crawler access | High for brands blocking AI crawlers | Peec AI analysis of 500,000 commercial prompts, April 2026; Similarweb/Modern Retail data, August 2025 |
| Cybersecurity | ~48% of tracked queries (all types) | Less than 10% for most vendors | 73% of vendors receive zero ChatGPT citations | GrackerAI 2026 benchmark of 100 vendors, 250 prompts (vendor-published; GrackerAI sells AI visibility services) |
| Financial services | ~48% of tracked queries (all types) | Low to moderate; regulatory caution limits AI sourcing | Very high | BrightEdge February 2026 estimate; no independent vertical-specific study found |
| B2B services (agencies, consulting) | ~48% of tracked queries (all types) | Low; category under-indexed in AI training data | Very high | Qualitative observation; no authoritative vertical study found |
Attribution and caveats. The 51% healthcare figure comes from WebFX’s July 2025 analysis of more than 130,000 U.S. health search queries. The 86.7% ecommerce commercial-query figure comes from Peec AI’s analysis of 500,000 buying-intent prompts (April 2026), a dataset deliberately skewed toward commercial intent. The 48% cross-industry estimate reflects BrightEdge’s February 2026 tracked keyword panel. The 73% cybersecurity zero-citation rate comes from GrackerAI’s 2026 benchmark, which tested 100 vendors across 10 sub-categories: GrackerAI sells AI visibility services, so the finding has a commercial interest behind it, and the figure is specific to ChatGPT citations, not all AI engines. All trigger-rate figures reflect Google AI Overviews; rates for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini vary by query type and prompt phrasing.
Healthcare: the highest-trigger vertical
Healthcare is the most AI-active vertical by any measure. Google AI Overviews appear more frequently on health-related searches than on searches in any other major category, according to multiple independent tracking studies.
The implication for healthcare marketers is not abstract. When a potential patient searches “best treatment for [condition]” or “find a [specialist type] near me,” the first thing they see is a generated answer, not a list of links. Your brand either appears in that answer, or it does not.
Most healthcare brands do not appear. The category is dominated by authoritative third-party sources: WebMD, the Mayo Clinic, PubMed, and major health systems. A smaller healthcare brand or specialty provider needs a deliberate content and citation strategy to build presence in AI-generated answers, not a better homepage.
Platforms that help healthcare teams track AI presence include Temso (from $89/mo, covers 8 engines including Google AI Overviews) and Profound (from $399/mo, with citation-level attribution). The AI visibility tools ranking covers the full comparison.
B2B SaaS: high competition, visible concentration
B2B SaaS is one of the most competitively contested AI visibility categories. According to Data-Mania LLC’s 2026 benchmarking research (a single-vendor study with undisclosed methodology), AI-generated answers now account for 17% of B2B SaaS brand discovery, up from 4% the prior year. That figure has not been independently verified, but it aligns directionally with what several independent buyer surveys show.
G2’s April 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers found that 51% now start their software research in an AI chatbot more often than Google, up from 29% in G2’s April 2025 survey. G2 is a software review marketplace with a commercial interest in this topic, and the figure has not been independently replicated. But both data points point the same direction: AI is already a primary discovery channel for software buyers.
The challenge for most SaaS brands is extreme concentration. A small number of brands in each category capture the majority of AI mentions. The rest receive little or nothing.
The tools that let SaaS teams track their share and identify which prompt families drive competitor mentions include Temso, AthenaHQ, and Profound. AthenaHQ’s Action Center is particularly well-suited to SaaS teams: it converts gap data into a prioritized fix list with reasoning, not just raw citation numbers.
Ecommerce: crawler access is the controlling variable
Ecommerce AI visibility splits cleanly along one variable: whether the retailer allows AI crawlers to access its product data.
Retailers that allow crawl access (Walmart, Etsy, Target, eBay) receive significant AI-referred traffic. Retailers that block it (Amazon) receive almost none. The Similarweb data from August 2025, reported by Modern Retail, is the clearest single illustration of this dynamic. It does not mean Amazon is invisible in all AI answers: it remains dominant in search-volume terms and appears in comparative responses. But for direct AI referral, crawl access is the prerequisite.
For ecommerce brands below the top-tier, the relevant question is not just whether you allow crawlers, but whether your product pages are structured in a way that AI engines can extract useful, attributable information. That is a content and technical problem, and it requires monitoring to track.
Temso covers AI referral tracking and content gap analysis for ecommerce teams from $89/mo. Scrunch AI adds SOC 2 compliance and the AXP technology that serves AI-optimized content to LLM crawlers without changing the human-facing site.
Cybersecurity: the zero-citation problem
Cybersecurity is the vertical with the most documented zero-citation crisis.
According to GrackerAI’s 2026 AI Search Visibility benchmark, which tested 100 cybersecurity vendors using 250 buyer-intent prompts across six AI platforms, 73% of vendors received zero ChatGPT citations when buyers queried their product category. GrackerAI is a vendor that sells AI visibility services, so the finding has a commercial interest behind it. But the directional result is consistent with what practitioners report across sub-categories: endpoint security, cloud security, SIEM, and identity management are all winner-take-most categories in AI search.
The top eight vendors in the GrackerAI study captured the large majority of all mentions. The other 92 split the remainder, with most getting nothing.
Why is cybersecurity so concentrated? Several reasons combine:
- Buyers use high-stakes, high-specificity queries (“best SIEM for a 500-person company”).
- AI engines default to well-documented, authoritative vendors to reduce liability for security-adjacent advice.
- Most cybersecurity vendors write for compliance audiences, not for the conversational, question-answering format that AI engines favor.
The practical implication: if you are not already in the cited minority, getting there requires content that directly answers the buyer questions AI engines receive, distributed across the third-party sources those engines trust. Brand-owned pages alone are not enough.
Temso and Profound both support cybersecurity teams tracking prompt-level citation rates. Scrunch AI is the option for enterprise buyers with SOC 2 requirements.
Financial services: regulatory caution creates a gap
Financial services is a high-trigger category in terms of raw query volume, but it is an unusual one in terms of citation behavior. AI engines apply more caution to financial content because the stakes of bad advice are high.
The result: AI-generated answers in finance tend to favor well-established, regulatory-compliant, institutional sources. Banking information? The FDIC and major bank sites. Investment guidance? SEC filings, major brokerages, Investopedia. Insurance? State-specific regulatory bodies and the largest carriers.
For mid-market financial services brands, this creates a meaningful barrier. The path to AI visibility is less about content volume and more about establishing third-party credibility in the sources AI engines trust: trade publications, regulatory filings, analyst coverage, and structured product comparisons on authoritative comparison sites.
No independent vertical-specific AI share of voice study for financial services has been published with a verifiable methodology as of June 2026. The cross-industry figure of approximately 48% AI Overviews trigger rate (BrightEdge, February 2026) applies here as a rough baseline.
B2B services: the under-indexed vertical
B2B services (agencies, consulting, professional services, staffing) is the most AI-invisible of the major verticals, and not primarily because of any technical barrier. It is under-indexed because the query patterns are diffuse and the AI training corpus has less structured, citable content about these categories than it does about products or clinical topics.
When a buyer asks ChatGPT “which digital marketing agency should I hire,” the engine faces a harder task than “which project management software is best.” There are fewer authoritative directories, fewer structured comparison pages, and fewer consensus signals across sources.
For B2B services brands, the first priority is not improving AI share of voice. It is creating the conditions under which AI engines can form a view of your brand at all: clear positioning, specific named outcomes, presence in analyst and award databases, and citations from trade media that AI engines trust.
No authoritative per-vertical AI share of voice study for B2B services has been identified with an independent methodology as of June 2026.
How to use these benchmarks
These numbers do not tell you what to do. They tell you what category you are in and roughly how contested it is.
Use the table this way:
- Find your vertical and read the zero-citation rate. If 73% of your category peers receive zero ChatGPT mentions, being in the cited minority is a competitive advantage, not a baseline expectation.
- Check the AI Overviews trigger rate. If your vertical triggers AI Overviews on more than 50% of queries, AI visibility is already affecting your top-of-funnel even if you cannot see it in GA4.
- Compare your own citation rate against the active-brand range. To do this, you need a tool that runs your category’s prompt set and reports your mention frequency. That is the measurement layer.
- Set a target for the next 90 days. If you are at zero, the goal is to appear in at least some prompts. If you are at 10%, the goal is to identify which prompt families drive competitor mentions and close the gap on those specifically.
The tools listed in this piece support all four steps. Temso is the broadest-coverage, lower-cost option for most teams: it tracks share of voice across eight AI engines, benchmarks you against competitors, and converts the gap data into an action plan, all from $89/mo. For teams that need citation-level attribution for board reporting, Profound adds that depth at a higher price. For enterprise buyers with compliance requirements, Scrunch AI adds SOC 2 and AXP delivery. For mid-market SaaS teams that want the most actionable recommendations, AthenaHQ has the highest G2 rating in the category and a prioritized action centre.
A full comparison of all tools is at /rankings/ai-visibility-tools. The measurement methodology behind share-of-voice tracking is at /methodology. Key terms are defined at /glossary.
A note on refresh cadence
AI share of voice benchmarks change faster than traditional SEO benchmarks. AI engine behavior shifts with model updates, retrieval changes, and the growth of the user base querying each engine. The figures in this piece reflect data available as of June 2026. Several of the underlying studies (BrightEdge, Peec AI, WebFX) update their tracking data on a quarterly or semi-annual basis.
Treat these numbers as a starting point, not a permanent calibration. Your internal measurement, run against your specific prompt set and your actual competitive set, is always the authoritative benchmark for your brand.
Start measuring your AI share of voice today. Temso tracks share of voice across 8 AI engines from $89/mo, with no credit card required to start. You will see your citation rate, your competitor rates, and a prioritized action plan in one place. If you need enterprise depth, the full tool ranking covers every option across all price tiers.