Semrush Spotlight 2026: a UK AI visibility benchmark and what it means for UK brands

Information correct as of 14 October 2026. The figures below come from Semrush’s own research and from Adobe data quoted in it, so treat them as vendor findings and read the full report before you rebuild a plan around them.

A brand’s visibility in AI answers depends on the country it is measured in, and at Spotlight 2026 Semrush brought the data to show it. Its announcement at the event was a new edition of the 2026 AI Visibility Index, with the company’s first UK benchmark. It found that ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews agree less in the UK than in the US about which brands to name and which websites to cite. The brands they name in Britain are more retail-led, the sources they cite lean harder on news publishers, and a brand named in every month of the study can still sit hundreds of places down the list of cited websites.

Semrush Spotlight 2026 came to Old Billingsgate, the Grade II listed Victorian market hall on the Thames near London Bridge, on Tuesday 13 October 2026. It was the first Spotlight held in London, as Semrush’s director of online visibility Leigh McKenzie told LBB; the 2025 edition was held in Amsterdam. It was also the first since Adobe completed its purchase of Semrush in April. Semrush billed two stages hosted with The Drum and Fortune, more than 80 speakers, over 100 sessions and about 1,000 senior marketers, with a separate AI Search Bootcamp the day before. The index went out on Business Wire at 10:01 UK time, and the report, titled “2026 AI Visibility Index: Where the Top Brands Stand in the UK and US”, can be downloaded from Semrush’s AI Visibility Index site.

A US benchmark, or one global AI visibility score, will mislead a British brand. UK answers draw more on news publishers, marketplaces and big retailers, and the four platforms differ enough that a good position on one says little about the other three.

Semrush measured the UK on its own for the first time

The new edition covers seven monthly snapshots from January to July 2026. Each month Semrush ran a fixed set of 2.5 million UK prompts and 25 million US prompts, built from its own search data, through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Google AI Overviews was measured separately from a larger, variable set of results for real search keywords. The landing page says the study spans 22 industries, and the release names Real Estate, Finance, Industrial and Sports as sectors where results differ markedly.

The UK prompt set is a tenth of the US one, so compare patterns between the markets, never raw volumes. The report’s own methodology adds two more limits. It counts how often a result recurs across the seven months, so a range such as “63 to 70” gives the lowest and highest monthly results and says nothing about direction. It also does not separate platform changes from differences in how the data was collected.

The headline comparison is agreement between platforms. On average, any two of the four platforms shared 63 to 70 of their top 100 mentioned brands in the UK, against 70 to 78 in the US, and the UK figure was lower in all seven months. Semrush also found that Gemini names more distinct brands per answer than ChatGPT, while ChatGPT cites the most sources per answer and Gemini the fewest. Google AI Overviews had the lowest brand overlap with the other three platforms in every month. AI Overviews and ChatGPT were the least alike on sources of any pair, in both markets. A larger share of leading UK domains appeared on only one platform.

Britain’s list stands out for its shops

Semrush calls the brands that made the top 100 mentions on all four platforms in every month the Universal Core. The UK had 24 such domain records and the US had 36. Fifteen appeared in both, among them Adobe, Apple, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok and YouTube.

Six of the nine that only the UK list contains are retailers or marketplaces: Amazon UK, Argos, Asda, eBay UK, Marks & Spencer and Tesco. The other three are the BBC, Nike and TripAdvisor UK. Semrush describes the US-only group as considerably broader, spanning automotive, sport and entertainment as well as retail.

These are domain records, so one multinational can appear twice, as Amazon does, and a consistent mention says nothing about recommendations, visits or sales. For a UK retailer, though, the list shows who the platforms treat as the default answer in the category.

Can a brand be mentioned by ChatGPT without being cited?

Yes, and the index suggests it is common. A mention is the brand’s name appearing in an answer; a citation is a website listed as a source for it. Averaged across 22 categories and four platforms, fewer than half of the top 100 mentioned brands also appeared among the top 100 cited domains, in every month and in both markets. In the UK the average overlap ran from 36.7 to 45.3 domains out of 100, depending on the month.

Semrush’s example uses two supermarkets. Tesco and Asda were both among the top 100 mentioned brands on all four platforms in every month studied. In July, Tesco ranked 25th among ChatGPT’s most-cited UK domains and Asda ranked 606th. On Gemini the gap was far smaller, at 29th and 60th. Those are rankings inside each platform’s UK data. They do not mean Tesco received many times Asda’s traffic from ChatGPT.

The pattern fits an earlier Semrush finding, which McKenzie repeated to LBB before the event: only 13% of branded AI answers link to the brand’s official website. Our view is that teams should report the two measures separately. A rising mention count can hide a weak source position, and only a citation links to your site.

UK AI answers lean on the news

The clearest national difference is the weight of news publishers. On ChatGPT, news sites accounted for a seven-month average of 29.5% of citations among the 100 most-cited UK domains, against 19.6% in the US. On Gemini, news was the leading UK source category in every month, at between 16.6% and 23.0% of top 100 citations. After news, ChatGPT’s UK citations favour trip-planning sites and online marketplaces; in the US, online learning and streaming platforms come next.

Concentration differs by platform too. In the UK, AI Mode’s ten leading source domains took between 23.2% and 35.8% of citations among its 10,000 most-cited UK domains across the seven months. For ChatGPT the figure was 12.8% to 15.4%. AI Mode leans on a small group of sites; ChatGPT spreads its citations wider, which gives specialist sites more of a chance.

Earned coverage carries more weight in UK AI answers than a US playbook assumes. That makes AI visibility in Britain as much a job for digital PR and reputation work as for SEO.

The commercial case rests on US retail data

The release leans on Adobe data for the business argument: AI-referred visitors convert 60% better than non-AI traffic and generate 53% more revenue per visit. Adobe’s AI Traffic Trends Report for August 2026 shows that both figures compare AI-referred and other visits to US retail websites in July 2026. They are a US retail signal and say nothing direct about a UK business.

Andrew Warden, Semrush’s global vice president of marketing and CMO, called AI “a decision layer for customers” in the release. Marissa Dacay, Adobe’s global vice president of enterprise marketing, said each added market brings its own audience and expectations, so brands need content tailored to each one and third-party signals around it.

Keep in mind who is saying this. Semrush sells an AI Visibility Toolkit and Adobe sells Brand Visibility and LLM Optimizer, so both benefit when marketers decide AI visibility needs measuring market by market. Semrush lists the toolkit’s Base plan at $99 a month per domain, billed annually, with 25 tracked prompts; that is a dollar list price, and its pricing page showed no pound price when we checked on 14 October 2026. The findings may well hold; they are still vendor research, and the report cannot show that any tool improves a brand’s results.

Spotlight is now part of Adobe’s pitch

Adobe agreed to buy Semrush on 19 November 2025 for $12 a share, valuing it at about $1.9 billion, and completed the deal on 28 April 2026. Adobe said it would connect Semrush with Experience Manager, LLM Optimizer, Commerce, Adobe Experience Platform and Brand Concierge.

Spotlight showed that integration in public. Adobe was the visionary sponsor, and Semrush now calls itself “an Adobe company”. The agenda also billed speakers from LinkedIn, Johnson & Johnson, HP and the Financial Times.

What was said on stage

Adweek covered two sessions on the day. In its report on OpenAI, Leila Woodington, OpenAI’s head of B2B marketing for EMEA, said on a panel that field marketing is currently OpenAI’s strongest channel for selling ChatGPT to businesses. Awareness alone, she argued, does not get a tool rolled out to thousands of staff or past the several executives who sign off. In a second report, Motorway’s marketing and brand director Cassie Hall said new content can show up in AI citations within about a day. Flo Health’s head of brand marketing, Georgia Jones, described a manager dedicated to AI assistant discoverability who works with every channel owner.

Flo’s approach matches the index: if citations come from many places, someone has to own them across channels. As of 14 October 2026, we found no publicly available full recordings of the London sessions. Semrush has shared event highlights and interviews, while the conference website still links to the 2025 keynote recordings.

What should UK marketing teams do next?

The index is mainly a lesson in measurement, and the order matters: benchmark first, buy tools last.

1. Benchmark the UK on its own. Track a UK prompt set separately from any US or global one, on each of ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, and compare yourself with UK competitors, never a global average.
2. Report mentions and citations as two numbers. For your most valuable prompts, record whether the brand is named and which domains the answer cites. The Tesco and Asda gap shows how far apart the two can be, and prompt research tells you which prompts deserve the effort.
3. Put UK publishers in the visibility plan. With news sites taking almost 30% of ChatGPT’s citations among the top 100 UK domains, coverage in British outlets belongs in the same plan as on-site SEO, alongside marketplace listings and review profiles, each with an owner and a date.
4. Make your own pages worth citing. Clear, specific pages with checkable facts give a platform a reason to use your site as the source when it names you. Our guide to ChatGPT, AI SEO and AEO sets out what that means in practice, and our GEO guide covers how to make a business easier for AI search to find, trust and mention.
5. Test before you buy a toolkit. Read the report’s methodology, then check 20 to 30 commercial prompts by hand across the four platforms. If the gaps you find are real and costly, compare tools on UK coverage and price in pounds, using each vendor’s own pricing page.

What to watch next

The UK data stops in July 2026, and the platforms have shipped model and product changes since, so the next edition may look different. Watch whether it adds markets beyond the UK and US, and how Adobe reports Semrush’s contribution in its next results.

The real lesson from Semrush Spotlight 2026

What Spotlight 2026 leaves behind is a dataset. The UK benchmark gives British marketers evidence they lacked: the AI platforms treat the UK as its own market, with its own default brands and its own preferred sources.

So stop borrowing American numbers. Measure the UK separately, platform by platform, and treat the sources an AI cites as a channel you have to earn.

Adobe’s side of this story is in our Adobe Summit London 2026 recap. Need a UK AI visibility audit, or help turning mentions into citations? Talk to AIWIZ.