Communication Services Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks

*This data comes from the 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report. To explore insights across all 10 industries, access the full report here.

Executive summary

There’s a new search experience for brands to prioritize: AI answer engines.

The rise of AI answer engines and Google’s integration of AI Overview (AIO) results directly onto traditional SERPs means users are increasingly getting answers from AI-generated summaries directly rather than clicking a link, leading to a surge in zero-click searches.

While organic search still fuels the majority of discovery, AI has introduced what we’re calling a parallel surface of visibility—an invisible layer that determines which brands are seen before anyone clicks.

The data shows that AI referral traffic currently represents just over 1% of total web visits and is growing by roughly 1% each month, on average. It will never rival traditional organic search traffic—but that’s not the point. In this new model, visibility no longer begins on your website; it starts within the AI experiences that answer questions, guide intent, and shape perception in real time. If your brand isn’t cited, mentioned, or referenced in these AI answers, it’s effectively absent from the modern customer journey.

AI visibility is becoming its own performance channel, one that signals which brands are trusted enough to enter the answer. Winning in this space isn’t about clicks; it’s about credibility.

The following findings provide the first layer of industry-specific benchmark data essential for navigating the new search landscape and ensuring credibility (and visibility) of your brand. It moves beyond traditional website analytics to provide key context for evaluating your total search performance, identifying accurate KPIs for organic, AEO / GEO, & AIO, and implementing the right strategies to drive results.

Top takeaways for Communications Services

• AEO, GEO & AI Search benchmarks:
  • AI referral traffic accounts for a small fraction of overall traffic within communications services (0.25%), but it’s growing, increasing .09% from July to September 2025, compared to .03% from May to July 2025.
  • ChatGPT is the clear market leader, driving 89.5% of all AI referral traffic in this industry.
  • In the media & entertainment subindustry, youtube.com (16.83%) is the dominant leader for AI citations from answer engines, while att.com (10.28%) and charter.com (9.77%) lead the telecommunications subindustry.
• AIO benchmarks:
  • Video is the most-cited page type in AIO results for this industry by a significant margin (over 500,000 video citations vs. 150,000 article citations).
  • Youtube.com overwhelmingly leads in Google's AI Overview citations, accounting for a massive 33.29% of the share of voice in the media & entertainment subindustry.
  • Verizon.com (.20%) and att.com (.15%) lead the telecommunications subindustry.

For Communications Services brands, success in 2026 won’t be defined solely by organic traffic or rankingsRankings
Rankings in SEO refers to a website’s position in the search engine results page.
Learn more. It will hinge on how effectively a brand appears inside AI answers, AI Overviews, and LLM-powered recommendations. These results indicate that, while AI search is still in its infancy, its impact on brand discovery is already substantial.

The data that follows paints a picture of this parallel surface of visibility: where AI is beginning to redirect attention, and which brands in the Communications Services sector are establishing early leadership in AI search and AIO presence.

Methodology

Using Conductor, we analyzed 13,770 domains from leading brands. Each domain was categorized into 10 industries and then further segmented into 22 subindustries to provide additional insights, which map directly to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) framework. This research identifies emerging traffic trends, separating traditional organic traffic from new AI referral patterns and zero-click visibility at a granular level.

For the purposes of this industry-specific report, the Communication Services industry was split into two subindustries: media & entertainment and telecommunications.

AI search methodology

The AI search market share and brand leaders are sourced from our analysis of 13,770 domains being cited against our index of 3.5 million unique prompts between May and September 2025. We focused on these domains as they aligned with the 10 GICS industry categories we are reporting on. The analysis included 17 million AI-generated responses and over 100 million citations sourced from our AI Search Performance (AISP) and AIO reporting index.

The findings on AI search traffic, organic Google traffic, and referral traffic by answer engine type were sourced by analyzing anonymized and aggregated traffic patterns across 1,215 of our enterprise customer domains to assess how users of answer engines are reaching websites.

Ultimately, we analyzed more than 3.3 billion sessions across all of our data sources. Of that traffic, AI traffic from LLMs and chatbots accounted for more than 35.7 million sessions across the 10 industries analyzed.

The following benchmarks are averages sourced from an analysis of monthly AI search traffic data in the U.S. over a five-month period (May 2025-September 2025) in Conductor.

AI Overview methodology

We analyzed AI Overview data in the U.S. over a four-week period from September 15 to October 12, 2025, to gain insight into how AI-powered search is affecting Google’s traditional search experience. To do so, we analyzed approximately 21.9 million unique Google searches from Conductor’s traditional search index. Of those Google searches, nearly 5.5 million generated an AIO result.

AEO & AI search visibility analysis for Communications Services

This analysis, based on our index of 3.5 million unique prompts tracked over the last six months, including 17 million responses and over 100 million citations coming from our AISP and AIO reporting, provides a granular, data-driven benchmark for true visibility in the AI search landscape.

This section focuses on:

• AI referral traffic by subindustry
• Month-over-month (MoM) growth
• AI referral traffic by answer engine
• AI vs. Traditional channels
• AI market share

AI referral traffic for the Communications Services industry

The results:

• AI referral traffic accounts for .25% of all website traffic for the Communication Services industry.
• Along with the Utilities (.35%) industry, the Communication Services (.25%) industry had the least AI referral traffic among the 10 industries analyzed.

While AI referral traffic remains small in volume, its impact on visibility is outsized. That .25% of AI referral traffic represents millions of interactions happening before a user visits a website. These moments decide which Communications Services brands show up in the new customer journey—and which are invisible.

AI referral traffic by Communications Services subindustries

The results:

• The media & entertainment subindustry accounts for .25% of all AI search traffic in the communications industry.
• The telecommunications subindustry accounts for .41% of all AI search traffic in the communications industry.

These are small numbers at first glance, but according to recent studies, users who leverage AI search have higher intent and are more likely to convert than traffic from traditional channels. These traffic differences between subindustries mean it’s critical to get granular about where your organization falls and abide by those benchmarks.

Month-over-month AI referral traffic change

The results:

• AI referral traffic in the Communication Services industry rose .12% from May to September 2025.
• July to September 2025 (+.09%) saw much larger jumps in referral traffic than May to July (+.03%).

AI referral traffic vs. Traditional SEO traffic benchmarks for Communication Services

The results:

• Established channels like organic search, paid, direct, social, and any other referral traffic still drive the vast majority of website visits across all industries.
• Organic Google traffic makes up nearly 40% of overall website traffic, and other traffic sources contribute 60.1%.

This significant organic traffic benchmark for Communications Services (39.65%) underscores the continued importance of a strong traditional SEO strategy. Even as AI search grows, optimizing for visibility in standard Google results is essential for improving brand visibility and relevance. This potential overlap reinforces the need for a dual approach of traditional SEO and AEO / GEO strategies.

AI referral traffic by answer engine source: Communication Services industry

The results:

• On average, ChatGPT drives 89.5% of all AI referral traffic in the Communication Services industry.
  • If you're not being cited on ChatGPT, you're losing out on the lion's share of high-intent AI referral traffic.
• Perplexity drove 5.5% of AI traffic to the Communication Services industry.
  • This highlights why focusing on ChatGPT isn’t enough to own AI search visibility. Communication Services brands should focus on optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot—the top three answer engines for their industry.

ChatGPT dominates the landscape right now, with nearly 90% of overall AI traffic referrals for Communications Services. That said, while it’s the engine you should prioritize within your AEO / GEO strategy, it’s not the only answer engine you should pay attention to. Prepare for future volatility by tracking your brand presence across all of these answer engines and then optimizing as needed if your mentions and citations drop.

Communication Services AI market share: Domain citation and brand mention leaders

This section is an analysis of the brands and domains that won the most AI market share in the Communication Services industry. Our analysis was based on AI citations and brand mentions between May 2025 and September 2025. The results are split across two key communications subindustries:

• Media & entertainment
• Telecommunications

Communications Services industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share

1. youtube.com
2. reddit.com
3. google.com
4. investopedia.com
5. reuters.com

In the Communication Services industry, AI models are prioritizing video content, making youtube.com the most-cited domain for explainers and visual guides, though it’s important to note that while YouTube is the cited domain, the videos being cited are largely from other sources. That means that while YouTube's domain gets the credit, it’s your brand’s optimized video that actually wins the citation.

We also saw a heavy reliance on reddit.com for real-world troubleshooting, which is a major query category for telecommunications. AI is pulling authentic, anecdotal user experiences from forums, often favoring them over traditional corporate troubleshooting guides.

Communications Services industry: Top 5 brand leaders by AI brand mention market share

1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Investopedia
4. Roku
5. Forbes

The top brand mentions largely reinforce the authority of the most-cited domains (Google, YouTube, Investopedia). The key insight here is that Roku appears as a top 5 brand. This indicates that a substantial portion of AI conversation within Communication Services is centered on specific streaming hardware and platforms, rendering brand authority a crucial factor in achieving visibility.

Media & entertainment subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

Below, we have the top five domains in the media & entertainment subindustry based on their share of domain citations in AI search.

This subindustry list is nearly identical to the overall Communication Services industry leaders, with youtube.com (16.83%) and reddit.com (6.40%) holding the top spots in both. This shows that for broad media-related queries, AI models prioritize high-volume video and user-generated content platforms over specific corporate domains.

Telecommunications subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

And these are the top five domains in the telecommunications subindustry based on their share of domain citations in AI search.

This list reveals a clear and dramatic split from the main industry rankings. All five domains here—led by att.com (10.28%) and charter.com (9.77%)—are new and do not appear on the overall industry chart. This signals that when a user's query is specific to telecom (like plans, support, or hardware), AI models bypass broad publishers and go directly to the primary service providers as the most trusted, authoritative sources for an answer.

AI Overview benchmarks for Communication Services

Despite the rise of AI answer engines, billions of searches still happen on Google, and every day, AI Overviews are appearing for more of those searches. That means it’s essential for brands to optimize their site to rank on page 1 in Google and increase their chances of winning an AIO result.

Below is our analysis of the AIO visibility in the Communication Services industry.

AIO visibility analysis: Communication Services industry

The results:

• AIO results appeared for 16.6% of analyzed Google queries in the Communication Services industry.
• Communication Services were in the middle of the pack in terms of AIO visibility compared to the other nine industries analyzed.

AIO visibility analysis: Communication Services subindustries

The results:

• Telecommunications searches triggered an AIO result 19.4% of the time among the queries analyzed, and 16.6% of the time in media & entertainment searches.

Although the communications industry may see fewer AIO results than some of the other industries, brands still need to prioritize optimizing for and winning these results because these results get seen first on SERPs. AIO affects a significant number of searches, and this trend is expected to increase over time.

Page types cited most often in AIO results for Communications Services

The results:

• Video was by far the most cited page source in AI Overviews, with over 500M pages being cited in the result.
• The next closest page type in AIO results was a standard article page with just over 150,000 citations.

The key takeaway here is that your content is much more likely to appear in AIO results for Communication Services queries if it’s a video or longer-form article. AIO tends to provide summaries to answer more complex queries, so it makes sense, regardless of industry, that longer-form content like articles and videos would be cited and mentioned in AI Overviews.

Communication Services AIO share of voice winners by subindustry

The following tables show the top 5 domains that were cited most often in an AI overview across the media & entertainment and telecommunications subindustries.

Media & entertainment subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Youtube.com (33.29%) accounted for by far the most AIO share of voice in the media & entertainment subindustry.
• Quora.com and reddit.com followed suit at 8.14% and 7.51% respectively.

YouTube (33.29%) is the internet's default video library, and AIO is very likely to pull insights from a "how-to" video before they cite a simple text blog. Quora (8.14%) and Reddit (7.51%) are massive repositories of real people’s experiences—that "E" in Google's E-E-A-T. AI models are trained to prioritize these authentic, anecdotal answers, providing a more trustworthy and less corporate-sounding response.

Telecommunications subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• verizon.com (.20%) holds the top spot for AIO market share in the Telecommunications subindustry.
• att.com (.15%) and t-mobile.com (.10%) follow, securing the second and third positions.

While the market share leaders are the major carriers, the key insight is how small those market shares are. This fragmentation suggests that for the vast majority of telecom-related AI Overviews, Google isn’t citing the primary providers. Instead, it’s pulling answers from a more diverse set of sources, likely including tech review sites, news outlets, and forums (like Reddit) to answer complex troubleshooting and comparison queries.

Summary

The future of digital discovery belongs to the brands that understand that AI visibility isn’t a nice-to-have metric—it’s the next frontier of search performance. Having informed, data-driven KPIs for both SEO and AEO / GEO enables digital teams to measure their total search visibility and adapt their strategies from clicks to zero-click citations.

Leverage the Communication Services industry benchmarks featured here to understand how your brand performs and where there are opportunities to improve.

Remember, the user shift to AI search is accelerating. While AI referral traffic is a small (but high-intent) channel today, now is the time to secure your market share in these new, answer-driven results to ensure you show up first—and keep showing up first.