Domain authority barely predicts whether ChatGPT names a brand. In Semrush's six-month study of 50,000 brands, the brands that owned a topic had the higher authority score in only about half of head-to-head comparisons. What did predict ownership was depth on the topic's buyer questions, and a separate Seer Interactive study shows the cited pages are the recently updated ones.
Semrush and Kevin Indig ran five prompts per category through ChatGPT across 1,094 US product and service categories, from January to June 2026, and logged which brands came back. The sweep covered 220,000 domains and 50,000 brands.
A brand owned a category if it appeared in at least four of the five prompts with a five-point lead over the next brand. Only 15.2% of categories had one. 53.7% were unsettled.
Where an owner's median lead was at least 2.9 points, it kept its position in 90.4% of month-over-month comparisons. Leads of 1.3 points changed hands often. A wide gap holds. What a model update does to a gap like that is not in the data, and we cannot tell you either.
Because the model is answering a buyer's question, and a domain score says nothing about whether you have answered it. In the Semrush matchups the topic owner had the higher Authority Score 52.5% of the time, which is a coin flip.
If you came here for a yes or no, you can stop at that number. The other two metrics people usually pay to move landed in the same place. Branded search edged ahead, which fits how we think this works: a brand people search for by name turns up on the third-party pages the models read.
What did track ownership was depth on the category's buyer questions. In practice that means the comparison question and the pricing question each get their own page with the answer at the top, instead of one overview page and a pile of backlinks. None of this makes domain authority dead; it still correlates with classic Google rankings. It is a poor reason to expect ChatGPT to name you.
| Metric | Topic owner had the higher value |
|---|---|
| Authority Score | 52.5% of matchups |
| Organic traffic | 48.4% of matchups |
| Branded search | 55.7% of matchups |
Updated inside the last year, going by the last-update date. Seer Interactive found that 78% of Gemini's cited pages, 73% of ChatGPT's, and 65% of Perplexity's had been updated within twelve months.
That comes from 7,683 cited pages and 47,097 citations across the three tools, March to June 2026. 72% of cited pages looked fresh by last update, and only 42% did by publish date. Over a quarter of the fresh pages had first been published two or more years earlier. Age is fine.
The number in the same study that bothers us is 98%. That is the share of citations that came from third-party sources outside the brand's control: the review sites, forum threads, comparison lists, and trade press. Your own page can be deep and fresh and still be one citation in fifty. It is why our AI search work spends as much time earning mentions on other sites as restructuring yours, and it is the slow part.
Pick one topic you can plausibly own, capture who ChatGPT names for it today, and spend the quarter on depth and third-party mentions rather than on the domain score. Visible movement typically lands in one to three months, not days.
The Semrush numbers are good news for a smaller brand. 53.7% of categories have no owner yet, and what decides ownership is work you can do without the bigger domain. Ads would show you a result this week. This will not. That is the cost, and we say it on the first call.
Corvan's AI search ranking is this guide, done for you: baseline on day one, content restructured for models, citations earned in trusted sources, and a monthly answer-share report against where you started.
For classic Google rankings, yes, it still correlates. For ChatGPT it predicts little: in Semrush's 2026 study the topic owner had the higher Authority Score in 52.5% of matchups. Treat a strong domain as a place to build depth, and nothing more.
Update the old ones first. In Seer Interactive's data 72% of cited pages looked fresh by last-update date against 42% by publish date, and over a quarter of the fresh pages were two or more years old. A real update to a page that already answers a buyer question is the cheapest citation work we know of.
The field is open. 53.7% of the 1,094 categories Semrush tracked had no settled owner, and the owners had the higher authority score in only about half of matchups. Holding one means keeping the lead closer to the 2.9 points that held than the 1.3 that did not, which is depth and freshness work rather than link buying.
If this post raises a question about your market, that's the scoping call. We reply within one business day.