2026 AI Search & AI Overview Benchmarks: Publishing
Across our 2026 Publishing AI search benchmarks analysis, the AI answer is where first impressions are made, and no engine matches Google AI Mode for total number of citations.
The engines: AI Mode drove 54.3% of the Publishing citations we analyzed, more than ChatGPT (19.4%) and Perplexity (13.1%) combined.
The AI Overviews: An AI Overview appeared on 41.3% of Publishing searches, and 42.2% of those citations came from pages ranking in Google's organic top 10. Ranking still helped, it just didn't guarantee the citation.
Who won: No single publisher owned the field. The top five domains held under a third of all citations. AI leaned on deep-library publishers, led by NerdWallet, Bankrate, and Forbes. Educational questions drove most of the citations, with recommendations and comparisons next. The best-of and versus queries.
Two patterns stood out: Your competition now crosses category lines. Brands like Walmart and Mayo Clinic surface in Publishing answers because AI names whoever fits the question, whatever industry they come from. And the AI Overview looked like a different game by content type. Common on evergreen and reference pages. Rare on breaking news. Wide open in consumer topics, locked down by a few databases in academic ones.
The publishers cited in these answers capture the visibility that used to come from SERP rankings. Getting into the AI answer is the next frontier for Publishing, and it rewards deep, well-structured content built for the questions readers actually ask.
The Publishing sector built its whole search playbook on one move. Rank on page one or in rich result types, win the click. AI retired that move. Answer engines and Google AI Overviews now answer the query before your headline gets a look, sources folded in, click optional. Whether your brand gets found no longer rides on your ranking. It rides on whether AI places you in the answer, and whether it names you in the shortlists it hands users.
Here's the counterintuitive part. In our 2026 AEO Benchmarks Report, AI drove just 1.08% of all website visits. Chasing AI for traffic is chasing the wrong number, and you'll wait a long time for it. The real prize is being the answer AI trusts enough to cite. That's an authority game. So this report sets referral numbers aside and tracks what actually moves in Publishing. Citations. Brand mentions. Where AI Overviews surface, and closes with a playbook of the specific moves that earn citations, so it's worth reading to the end.
Key takeaways for Publishing AEO and AI Overviews
AEO & AI search insights
- Google AI Mode led the highest share of citations in Publishing at 54.3%, ahead of ChatGPT (19.4%) and Perplexity (13.1%). Most teams don't have an AI Mode strategy yet. This data says you need one.
- The citation market share leaders were finance and health publishers with deep content libraries: NerdWallet (7.5%), Bankrate (6.5%), and Forbes (5.7%). Publishers out-cited the brands they write about.
- Most Publishing citations came from prompts asking to learn something. Educational prompts drove 36.4% of citations, followed by prompts looking for recommendations (14.2%) and comparisons (10.6%). Publishing earned citations by explaining topics, ranking options, and comparing them.
Google AI Overviews
- Google delivered an AI Overview on 41.3% of searches in Publishing in this analysis, with subindustry rates ranging from 36.2% to 52%. In the Specialized/Academic subindustry, an AI Overview appeared on 52% of searches, followed by 46.6% in Consumer Lifestyle and 36.2% in News/Journalism.
- 57.8% of Publishing AI Overview citations came from pages outside Google's organic top 10. Ranking on page one and landing in the AI answer were two separate games.
Methodology
We built this report on Conductor data covering two parts of AI search: the answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI ModeAI Mode
AI mode is a search feature using AI to provide comprehensive answers by synthesizing information from multiple sources into direct responses.
Learn More, Gemini, and others) and Google AI Overviews. The answer engine and AIO analyses draw on the same set of 672 domains from leading brands in Publishing, so both describe the exact same brands.
Every metric anchors to the cited domain. A citation counts toward Publishing based on the industry of the domain that got cited, not the topic of the question. We classified the question separately, and only to read intent.
We also built our own industry framework for this report. It doesn't use the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), the standard financial classification behind our 2026 benchmarks report. GICS is designed for public companies and capital markets, and it has no clean slot for publishers, or for the way this industry competes online. So we defined the Publishing industry that reflects how these brands actually show up in AI answers, then split each into subindustries as follows:
Industry | Subindustry | What it includes (examples) |
|---|---|---|
Publishing | Consumer Lifestyle | Publishers and comparison sites aimed at consumers, covering money, health, and everyday decisions (NerdWallet, Bankrate, Forbes) |
Publishing | News/Journalism | General and business news outlets (CNBC, U.S. News, Business Insider) |
Publishing | Specialized/Academic | Academic databases and scholarly or technical publishers (ScienceDirect, MDPI, Springer) |
For AEO and AI search, we analyzed more than 13 million Publishing brand citations, January 1 and May 31, 2026, in the U.S., across seven engines: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Grok. The data covers more than 690,000 distinct prompts.
For Google AI Overviews, we looked into a rolling four-week snapshot, May 20 to June 20, 2026, covering 16.1 million U.S. Google searches. We measured how often those searches triggered an AIO, which domains got cited, what page types the AIO pulled from, and how AI Overviews citations compared against the organic top 10 in SERPs.
AI citation share by answer engine in Publishing
We measured AI citations directly and split them by engine. In Publishing, Google AI Mode drove more citations than any other engine.
If you expected ChatGPT or Perplexity on top, you’re not alone. They are where people go to chat, so they feel like the giants. This measures citations, not users, and two things pushed AI Mode to the front in Publishing. It cited more per answer, and it showed up on more prompts.
In Publishing, AI Mode averaged seven citations per answer, nearly double ChatGPT's 3.9 and ahead of every other engine. That fits how it works. AI Mode uses query fan-out, breaking one question into several and pulling a source for each piece. Other engines draw on multiple sources too. AI Mode's answers just cited the most in our data.
It also cited Publishing brands on far more questions. Across the five-month window, AI Mode returned a Publishing citation on more than a million distinct searches, more than any other engine. More sources per answer, spread across more questions. That's how it ended up with the most Publishing citations overall.
Read AI Mode's lead for what it is. A signal of where citations get handed out. Different from a headcount of who uses what. The strategic point still holds. If your AEO tracking stops at ChatGPT, you're watching a sliver of the field and missing the engine that cited Publishing most. Weigh that against where your audience actually searches, and cover both.
Publishing AEO market share leaders in 2026
Market share in AI search comes down to two questions: which domains get cited most, and which brands get mentioned most. Citations are the links AI pulls into an answer; mentions are the times AI names a brand in the text, with or without a link. A brand can lead one and trail the other, so we tracked both.
This is the analysis of the domains and brands that won the most AI market share in Publishing, based on AI citations and brand mentions from January to May 2026. All leaders included had at least 1% market share.
One thing to read carefully in the brand chart. A few names from other industries surface among Publishing brand mentions, like Mayo Clinic and Progressive. There's a reason for it, and the reason itself is worth flagging.
We attribute a brand mention to an industry by the in-scope domain cited alongside it. When an AI answer cites a Publishing site and also names a brand from another category, that brand earns a Publishing mention.
Here's a concrete case from our data. The query "how do I get a quote for auto insurance in Florida?" cited NerdWallet, a Publishing finance site. Answers to questions like that also name carriers like Progressive or GEICO. So those insurers pick up a Publishing brand mention, even though they sell insurance, not content.
That crossover reveals the competitive AI search landscape as it really is. In an AI answer, your rivals for a citation include whoever else the engine pulls into the same response, across category lines. A publisher competes with health systems and carriers for AI search market share in a money-or-health answer.
Citations and mentions are only half the story. They tell you the outcome. Whether you showed up. The prompts behind them tell you where the contest is happening. Which questions surface your brand and your rivals. Where to create the content that wins the next answer. Track the prompts, not just the citations they produce.
Top 5 Publishing domains by AI citation market share: overall
- NerdWallet (7.5%), Bankrate (6.5%), Forbes (5.7%), ScienceDirect (5%), and Investopedia (3%) led.
Look at the winners and a clear pattern shows up. Almost all of them cover the same two topics: personal finance and academic research. Four of the top five are money sites (NerdWallet, Bankrate, Forbes, and Investopedia). The fifth, ScienceDirect, is a library of peer-reviewed studies. What they share is depth. Each one holds a huge library of pages answering very specific questions, and that's exactly what AI pulls from when it writes an answer. The site that reviews the banks gets cited more often than the banks themselves.
The field is more open than those five leaders suggest. Together they held under a third of Publishing's citations, and the rest spread across a long tail of sites.
You don't have to out-publish NerdWallet to win. Pick a cluster of specific, high-intent questions. Answer them better than anyone. Keep the pages current. AI will cite you on those, even while the big publishers own the category overall.
Top 5 Publishing brands by AI brand mention market share: overall
- Bankrate (3.5%), NerdWallet (3.5%), Walmart (2.6%), Forbes (2.3%), and Investopedia (1.8%) led.
Four of these five also led the domain list. Bankrate, NerdWallet, Forbes, and Investopedia get cited for their content and named as brands. One name doesn't belong to a publisher at all. Walmart doesn't produce Publishing content, yet it landed third in Publishing brand mentions.
That's the shift this whole analysis is about. In an AI answer, your competitionCompetition
Businesses generally know who their competitors are on the open market. But are they the same companies you need to fight to get the best placement for your website? Not necessarily!
Learn More includes any brand the AI engines decide to name for that prompt, across every category line. Getting into the AI answer is the contest, and the answer doesn't sort itself by industry.
Our data showed this happening in two ways.
Sometimes it was authority crossing category lines. A brand from another industry earns a mention because AI trusts its content on that question. Mayo Clinic surfaced among Publishing mentions for exactly this reason. It's a high-trust content producer with a huge library explaining symptoms, diseases, and procedures, so AI names it alongside health and consumer publishers. In a health answer, a publisher is up against every credible source the engine reaches for, including hospital systems with deeper content libraries than most media brands.
Sometimes it was the question itself pulling a brand in. Walmart's Publishing mentions came almost entirely from shopping and money prompts where AI cited a publisher and named Walmart as the store. The publishers earning those citations were the ones you'd expect on commercial questions: Consumer Reports, Tom's Guide, CNET, GoodRx, and Forbes. Walmart showed up because the question is about buying, and AI answered it with publisher content that named the retailer.
Mayo Clinic and Walmart were limited to their own industries in the 2026 AEO Benchmarks Report. Their appearance here six months later in Publishing is the point. In AI search, your competition isn't limited to other publishers. A hospital system or a national retailer can land in a Publishing answer any time AI decides they answer the prompt, and that changes who you're actually competing with for the citation.
For a publisher, that pattern is a content signal worth reading. A real share of your AI visibility is won on consumer, product, and price-comparison questions. The ones where people are deciding what to buy and where. Those are answers your content is already landing in, right beside the retailer being asked about.
Publishing AI visibility leaders by subindustry
The industry view shows who leads Publishing overall. The subindustry view shows who you actually compete with. We split Publishing into three subindustries, Consumer Lifestyle, News/Journalism, and Specialized/Academic, so you can benchmark against the sites closest to yours rather than the whole field. Here is who led each in this analysis.
Consumer Lifestyle: AEO market share leaders by domain citations
- NerdWallet (14%), Bankrate (12.1%), and Forbes (10.6%) led, followed by Investopedia (5.6%) and GoodRx (4.8%).
This is where Publishing's citation weight is concentrated. The finance and health publishers that anchor the industry took the top spots, and their shares here ran far higher than at the industry level, all in double digits at the top. That's because Consumer Lifestyle is the biggest slice of Publishing's citations.
News/Journalism: AEO market share leaders by domain citations
- CNBC (11.8%) and U.S. News (9.8%) led, followed by Business Insider (7.1%), CNET (3.6%), and CBS News (3.5%).
Business and consumer news outlets won here. AI reached for the ones that pair reporting with explainers and rankingsRankings
Rankings in SEO refers to a website’s position in the search engine results page.
Learn More, with CNBC and U.S. News well ahead of the rest of the field.
Specialized/Academic: AEO market share leaders by domain citations
- ScienceDirect (21.8%) led, ahead of arXiv (8.8%), MDPI (8%), Springer (7.1%), and Wiley (5.2%).
Citations here concentrated among the big research databases and journal publishers. ScienceDirect alone took more than a fifth of the subindustry (21.8%), a sign that AI reaches first for the largest academic repositories.
Search intent in Publishing AI search: what content to create to get cited
Knowing who gets cited is half the picture. The other half is what people asked when those citations happened, because that tells you what to create. We classified the prompts behind every in-scope Publishing citation into one of Conductor's seven search intents, more than 690,000 distinct prompts in Publishing alone.
This analysis uses Conductor's Intent Taxonomy to categorize how AI engines respond to different user goals. The seven intent categories map to the universal stages of how we all use the internet today.
Intent | What it means | Sample prompts |
|---|---|---|
Education | Seeking to learn a new concept or solve a foundational problem | "how to get published in taylor and francis journals" "research papers on advanced ev battery cooling methods" |
Recommendations | Looking for suggestions or the best-rated options in a category | "best banks for opening a checking account" "best checking accounts for avoiding atm fees" |
Comparison | Weighing two or more specific options against each other | "compare online free checking account offers" "how do interest rates for home equity loans compare to personal loans or credit cards" |
Navigational | Looking for a specific website, portal, or known brand service | "login to taylor & francis online library" "routledge librarians portal login" |
Pricing | Investigating specific costs, fees, or subscription tiers | "taylor & francis article access cost" "credit cards with low annual fees for young professionals" |
Purchase | Ready to buy a product or take a direct transactional action | "credit card offers for new customers with good terms" "bank promotions for new accounts" |
Support | Needing technical help, troubleshooting, or customer service | "contact taylor & francis library services" "checking accounts with good customer support for retirees" |
Education prompts led Publishing at 36.4% of citations, more than any other intent. When AI reaches for a source, it's usually answering a how, what, or why question, and it rewards the sites that teach.
Recommendations (14.2%) and Comparison (10.6%). The best-of and versus questions. Which card. Which loan. Publishing earned citations by explaining topics, ranking options, and comparing them side by side. Lead with educational content, then layer in comparisons and roundups.
About a fifth of Publishing citations came from prompts our classifier couldn't sort into a named intent, so read these shares as the shape of demand, not the whole of it. Set the Unclassified bucket aside. What's left is your content brief.
That covers the answer engine side of Publishing. Which engines cited, who they cited, and what they cited for. Google AI Overviews played by different rules, and they're up next.
Publishing AI Overviews benchmarks
Overall, 41.3% of Publishing searches triggered an AIO in this study, which is more than two in five. The industry covers a lot of ground. Consumer finance sits next to lifestyle. Breaking news sits next to an academic reference. AI Overviews treat those slices differently.
Publishing AIO prevalence by subindustry
- Specialized/Academic (52%) led. Consumer Lifestyle (46.6%) sat mid-pack. News/Journalism (36.2%) brought up the rear.
That's a 15.8% spread top to bottom. Settled, factual answers are Google's sweet spot for summarizing, which is why academic and reference queries pull the most overviews. Fast-moving news pulls the fewest.
Page types cited most in Publishing AI Overviews
Knowing which page types get cited in AI Overviews tells you what content to actually create. Google favors different formats in different corners of Publishing. The charts below show the top five page types cited in AI Overviews for each subindustry. Here is what each label means:
Page type | What it is |
|---|---|
Article | A standard editorial article, the default when a page isn't one of the more specific formats below |
Listicle/Best-of | Ranked or list-style roundups, like "best budget laptops" or "top 10" pieces |
How-to | Step-by-step instructional pages that walk through a task |
Explainer/Guide | Pages that define or explain a concept, like "what is X" articles and how-it-works guides |
Reference | Reference entries: dictionary, encyclopedia, wiki, glossary, and academic topic or individual academic papers and journal entries |
News | Dated news stories and reporting |
Review | Product or service review pages |
Document/PDF | Downloadable PDF documents |
Specialized/Academic: top five page types in AIO
- Article (50.2%) and Reference (45%) nearly tie, far ahead of Document/PDF (1.4%), News (0.8%), and Explainer/Guide (0.7%).
This is the one Publishing subindustry where reference pages rivaled articles. Reference here covers encyclopedic and dictionary entries, and the two formats together pulled about 95% of AIO citations. Google ran almost entirely on articles and reference works here.
Consumer Lifestyle: top five page types in AIO
- Article (60.1%) dominates, followed by Listicle/Best-of (16.3%), How-to (5.5%), Explainer/Guide (4.6%), and Reference (3.6%).
Consumer Lifestyle ran on the standard article, with best-of listicles a distant second. The mix rewards publishers who pair straight explainers with ranked roundups.
News/Journalism: top five page types in AIO
- Article (50.5%) led, then Listicle/Best-of (20.1%), News (11.4%), Review (6.7%), and How-to (5.2%).
Best-of listicles and news pages climbed higher here than anywhere else in Publishing, but the standard article still took half of all citations.
Publishing AIO share of voice leaders by subindustry
The following tables show the top five domains in each subindustry that were cited most often in an AI overview.
Specialized/Academic: top winning domains for AIO share of voice
- ScienceDirect (29.7%) dominated, far ahead of Britannica (11.7%), Merriam-Webster (9.8%), EBSCO (7%), and Cambridge (6.8%).
This was the most top-heavy subindustry in Publishing: a few sites took most of the citations instead of the field sharing them out. ScienceDirect alone pulled nearly 30%. Scholarly questions lean on a small set of go-to databases and reference works, so citations piled up in a handful of big names.
Consumer Lifestyle: top winning domains for AIO share of voice
- NerdWallet (8.3%) and Healthline (8.2%) led, followed by Bankrate (7.8%), Investopedia (7.1%), and GoodRx (6.3%).
Finance and health publishers owned this subindustry. The field is tight. Five brands sat within two points of each other, no single site dominated.
News/Journalism: top winning domains for AIO share of voice
- U.S. News (14.5%) led by a clear margin, ahead of CNBC (9.2%), CNET (8.5%), Business Insider (7.3%), and The New York Times (4.9%).
Business and general news outlets took the AIO citations here, with U.S. News well out in front. The lineup skews toward outlets that pair reporting with rankings and explainers, not the ones chasing breaking news.
Where AI search goes from here for Publishing
Two things are worth settling before you plan anything. The answer engines and AI Overviews keep separate books. A brand can top one and barely register on the other. Healthline is the clearest case with 4.9% of Publishing's AIO citations, near the top of that field, against 2.4% in the answer engines. Read one surface in isolation and you'll draw the wrong conclusion about where you stand.
Ranking well also isn't the same as getting cited anymore. Even a page at Google's organic position one made the AIO just 40.7% of the time. 57.8% of Publishing's AIO citations went to pages that never reached the organic top 10. A page-one finish no longer guarantees a seat in the answer.
So what do you do about it? A few moves come straight out of the data in this research:
- Monitor visibility beyond ChatGPT. AI Mode drove more Publishing citations than any other engine.
- Write for how AI Mode reads. It fans a question out into many sub-queries and rewards depth and structure. A thin page gives it nothing to pull.
- Teach first, then compare. Educational questions drove the most Publishing citations at 36.4%, so lead with the how, what, and why. Then layer in the comparisons and best-of roundups AI reaches for next, built as well-structured articles.
- Weight your AIO effort by content type. The AI Overview doesn't show up evenly in Publishing searches. It appeared on 52.0% of Specialized/Academic searches and just 36.2% of News/Journalism searches, because Google summarizes settled facts far more than breaking news. If you publish evergreen or reference content, AIO is worth fighting for. If you publish timely news, expect fewer of them and put more weight on the answer engines.
- Know your subindustry's odds. Where AIO does show up, the field runs from wide-open to locked. In Consumer Lifestyle, no publisher holds more than about 8% of the citations, so a focused site can break in. In Specialized/Academic, one database, ScienceDirect, holds nearly 30%, so winning there means dislodging an incumbent or owning a narrow niche it doesn't cover.
- Track how AI describes you. This report tells you whether you showed up in a citation. Whether AI recommends you or quietly sends readers elsewhere is a separate question, and answering it requires an independent analysis of your brand sentiment within AI search.
None of this replaces traditional SEO though. Ranking and AI citation are connected but separate games, and the brands that win Publishing search play both as users are split across search experiences.
For publishers, the data points to a clear content plan. Teach first: educational content earned the most citations, leading Publishing at 36.4% of intent. Then layer in the comparisons and best-of roundups AI reaches for next, built as well-structured articles, the format AI Overviews cited most in Consumer Lifestyle and News/Journalism. Keep it current, and go narrow and deep on the questions you can answer better than anyone.
AI search is developing, yet it already decides who gets found in Publishing. The brands treating it as a real channel now, with real measurement behind them, are the ones who will own the answer when it counts.
