BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 26, 2026--
Semrush, an Adobe company and the leading brand visibility platform, today announced the release of the 2026 AI Visibility Index flagship study. Building on the original AI Visibility Index, launched in September 2025, the report represents a major expansion of Semrush’s AI search intelligence capabilities, scaling from an initial analysis of 2,500 prompts to 126 million U.S. AI search prompts analyzed from January through April 2026. The expanded dataset offers one of the most comprehensive views to date of how brands are mentioned, cited, and surfaced across major AI search platforms — and how AI-powered discovery is reshaping brand visibility across industries.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260626995770/en/
The launch comes as consumers increasingly embrace AI-powered chat services and browsers to discover and evaluate product offerings. New data from Adobe highlights the substantial growth in this channel, where AI traffic to U.S. retail sites have surged 1,324% between October 2024 and May 2026. In the travel sector, AI traffic is up 2,215% in the same period. However, marketers face a growing measurement challenge. Semrush found that 45% of marketing leaders cannot accurately measure their brand visibility within AI-generated answers, while only 9% have the tools to track all relevant metrics across platforms.
The Index establishes benchmarks across 22 industries, helping organizations understand why brand performance can vary significantly between AI platforms and where new visibility opportunities are emerging.
“Your AI narrative is becoming the decisive entry point to your customer experience,” said Rachel Thornton, CMO, Adobe Enterprise. “But the new reality is, your customers are both people and AI agents. Minimizing brand drift to ensure accuracy and consistency across every digital touchpoint is now the starting point for securing visibility. This requires new content strategies, stronger data foundations, and organization-wide governance.”
AI Visibility Is Becoming a Brand Narrative Challenge
The Index shows that AI-powered discovery is no longer shaped by a single search result, owned website, or ranking position. Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews, brands are being interpreted, summarized, mentioned, and cited through different combinations of owned content, third-party sources, community discussions, publishers, retailers, and reference platforms – meaning brands must now compete not only to be found, but to be accurately understood and credibly supported.
The four platforms analyzed also demonstrate significantly different citation patterns. ChatGPT cites an average of 15 sources per response and frequently relies on community and reference platforms such as Reddit and Wikipedia, while Gemini cites an average of 3 sources per response, drawing on a smaller pool of citations that includes Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube. These differences help explain why a brand can perform strongly in one AI environment while having limited visibility in another, reinforcing the need to measure AI visibility platform by platform while strengthening the broader brand signals AI systems use to recognize, trust, and recommend brands.
“AI is now intrinsic to the default search experience, and brands need to adapt. The name of the game is Brand Visibility,” said Andrew Warden, Vice President of Marketing at Adobe and former CMO of Semrush. “ The foundations of SEO are critically important in creating trust signals for AI, but visibility now depends on how consistently a brand reinforces its narrative across digital channels. Marketing teams need to redesign how they work across SEO, content, communications, data, and brand governance to compete in this new environment.”
Additional AI Visibility Index Takeaways
Beyond the headline findings, the study reveals several important dynamics shaping how brands appear, compete, and build trust across AI-powered discovery environments:
Availability
The 2026 AI Visibility Index is available now at https://ai-visibility-index.semrush.com/ and https://business.adobe.com/solutions/brand-visibility.html?ai-visibility. The report includes platform and industry benchmarks, brand case studies, and guidance for organizations building integrated AI visibility strategies.
About Semrush
Semrush, an Adobe company, is the leading brand visibility platform, empowering marketers to command their online presence and create measurable impact. Built on the industry’s most expansive proprietary dataset, Semrush delivers AI-driven insights across SEO, Agentic Search Optimization, content marketing, paid media, and social strategy. Used by over 28 million users globally – from scaling startups to the Fortune 500 – Semrush provides the competitive intelligence needed to win visibility in an evolving digital landscape.
AI Visibility Index - Semrush, an Adobe Company
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — For a few years at the turn of this century, Nashville was home to a remarkable carousel.
Described by its artist-creator Red Grooms as a sculpto-pictorama, the “horses” were 36 whimsical figures related to Tennessee. Legendary country musician Chet Atkins rode the neck of a guitar. Davy Crockett wrestled a bear. You could even ride a chigger, a summer mite that latches onto ankles causing an intense itch.
The Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel was magical but was perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time, perched on the riverfront at the edge of downtown Nashville when the area was up-and-coming but not quite the tourist draw of today. When it could no longer support itself financially, the carousel was disassembled and given over to the care of the Tennessee State Museum, which placed it in a storage facility where it sits to this day.
Now, more than 20 years later, momentum is building for the carousel to ride again.
Tennessee State Museum Executive Director Ashley Howell says the question she most commonly hears from the public is: “What about the Red Grooms carousel?”
The museum was planning a grand new building when it took custody of the ride, but it didn’t create an area for the carousel due to a lack of funds, Howell said. The new museum opened in downtown Nashville in 2018 with a retrospective of Grooms’ work but no carousel.
In November, the museum put out feelers for private parties interested in “partnering with the Museum in the restoration, placement, and operation of the Red Grooms Fox Trot Carousel.”
Howell, who took the top job at the museum in 2017, said she had planned to turn her attention to the carousel sooner, but was hindered by twin disasters in 2020: A tornado clipped the new museum and destroyed a storage building then, just days later, the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down.
However, all the questions about the carousel's return underscore “how beloved this work of art is to the community,” she said.
“It was only on the riverfront for a short time, but it has sort of lived in memory much longer than it was in operation,” Howell said. “We're excited to think about next steps.”
Grooms, who was born in Nashville in 1937, left the city after high school and spent most of his career in New York.
His work is colorful and whimsical, and he often creates large installations that viewers can enter and touch.
One of his best known exhibits is Ruckus Manhattan, from 1976. The New York Times described it as “a walk‐in carnival reconstruction of Manhattan landmarks and the sometimes bizarre fauna that inhabit them,” including a subway car that was “a form of participation theater.”
Marina Pacini, who curated a Grooms exhibit for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2016, said he is really a storyteller whose work is filled with “absolutely riveting” details.
“They operate on multiple levels, but you do not have to be an art expert in order to enjoy unpacking what’s going on in them,” she said, adding: “People adore his work.”
While selecting pieces for the exhibit, Pacini visited the carousel in storage. She said it was hard to choose from among them.
“The generosity of him making something like a carousel — that he put that much thought and effort into the individual characters and into how he defined them — and then to create them into something that you can actually climb on! I mean, most people go to museums and you’re not allowed to touch anything,” she said. “Here you are, you’re actually getting to climb onto a work of art. How much more fun could it possibly be?”
Grooms, who is 89 years old, did not respond to questions about the carousel.
Some of Grooms' biggest fans and collectors are in Nashville, so when his Manhattan gallery closed a few years ago, he moved his representation to David Lusk, who operates galleries in Nashville and Memphis.
An exhibition last year of drawings and ephemera from the making of the Fox Trot Carousel reminded people about the carousel, Lusk said.
He said the question remains as to “whether it's an artwork or whether it's meant for people to be straddling and riding it.”
If it has to be restored like an Old Master painting, then the cost is likely prohibitive. But if the goal is for it to be a working carousel, it need not be in pristine museum condition.
“He’s pretty assured that it is in good shape and ready to go again. So it’s just frustrating that it's not out there for people to enjoy,” Lusk said. “Red wants it used — looked at, used, loved.”
A figure of Eugene Lewis from the Fox Trot Carousel is seen in a state government storage facility Wednesday, June 24, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
A figure of Andrew Jackson from the Fox Trot Carousel is seen in a state government storage facility Wednesday, June 24, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
FILE - Artist Red Grooms poses in New York, July 16, 1998, with one of the figures for the Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel he has created for Nashville, his native town. (AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett, File)
A figure of Chet Atkins and other parts of the Fox Trot Carousel are seen in a state government storage facility Wednesday, June 24, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
A figure of Mr. Fox Trot from the Fox Trot Carousel is seen in a state government storage facility Wednesday, June 24, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
