01Industries
Industry SEO and AI search: seventeen verticals, chosen because forty would be a name swap
We work as an SEO and AI visibility agency across the verticals below. Each page says what genuinely differs in that sector, which is why there are seventeen of them rather than forty.
Quick answer
Two things genuinely differ by sector: the source landscape an assistant draws on, and the shape of the buyer prompts. The optimisation techniques overlap heavily.
What also differs is how concentrated the category is. In one 2026 study the top three brands held 82.9% of category visibility in News and Media and 76.9% in Consumer Electronics. That changes what a realistic target looks like before any work starts.
Key takeaways
- Retrieval is winner-take-most. The retriever picks one to three sources and stops. The fourth-best source is not slightly less visible. It is absent.
- Only 36 global brands held top-100 visibility across all four dominant engines in a January to April 2026 study. Thirty-six in total, not per engine.
- Ranking on Google does not carry over reliably. One April 2026 study of 120 keywords found 44% of Google’s top-ranking SaaS brands were absent from ChatGPT answers.
- Concentration varies by sector, from around 41% top-three share in Finance to 82.9% in News and Media. Ask what your category looks like before setting a target.
- We removed 157 templated industry pages from this project’s own plan before writing these six. Vertical pages that swap a noun are the pattern, not the exception.
- Adding a vertical is earned. A client engagement or a dataset, not a keyword.
What actually differs by industry
Two things, and neither is the technique.
- The source landscape. A regulated healthcare query gets cautious, heavily sourced treatment from institutional publishers. A SaaS comparison query pulls from review sites and community threads that may never rank in Google's top ten.
- The shape of the prompts. SaaS buyers ask for comparisons and alternatives. Healthcare buyers ask about eligibility and cost. Legal buyers ask jurisdiction-bound questions that assistants hedge on heavily.
Everything else — answer structure, entity consistency, technical access, off-site citation work — is shared. Anyone offering forty industry pages is describing the same service forty times.
The concentration curve you are competing against
This is the finding that should shape your target before any work begins, and it is the one most vertical pages leave out.
| Category | Top-three share | What that means for a challenger |
|---|---|---|
| News and media | 82.9% | Displacement is a multi-year programme, not a quarter |
| Consumer electronics | 76.9% | Niche sub-categories are the realistic entry point |
| Industrial | 42.2% | Genuinely contestable with sustained work |
| Finance | 41.4% | Contestable, but regulated content slows the cycle |
| Brands holding top-100 visibility across all four engines | 36 globally | Cross-engine dominance is rare enough to be a poor target |
Classical SEO rewarded incremental improvement: move from position twelve to eight and you gain some click share. Retrieval does not work that way. The model selects one to three sources and stops. Being fourth is being absent.
The practical consequence is that a narrower target beats a broader one. Winning a specific sub-category or use-case prompt cluster is achievable. Winning "best [category] software" against three entrenched incumbents usually is not, and we would rather say that in the scoping call.
Verified Third-party research with its limitations stated. Sourcing: our measurement standard.
The six industries we cover
Why we removed the other thirty-five
The source page map for this project contained 41 industry hubs and 157 templated child pages built from six repeating slug patterns. That is the same pattern the project's own governance rules ban for city pages, applied to sectors.
We cut it to six we can serve properly. A vertical gets added when a client engagement or a dataset gives us something differentiated to say, not when a keyword exists.
What a sector engagement adds
- A prompt set built from that sector's buying language, not a generic template
- The source landscape mapped for your category, so off-site work goes to the right places
- A realistic concentration read before targets are set
- Competitor sets that reflect who you actually lose to, not who ranks nearby
- Compliance-aware content where the sector requires it
02Common questions
Questions about sector work
Does AI visibility really differ by industry?
Yes, in two ways that matter. The source landscape an assistant draws on is category-specific, and so is the shape of the buyer prompts. The optimisation techniques themselves overlap heavily across sectors.
How concentrated is AI visibility within a category?
Severely. A Semrush study covering January to April 2026 found the top three brands hold 82.9% of category visibility in News and Media, 76.9% in Consumer Electronics and around 41% in Finance and Industrial. The curve is steep everywhere they looked.
Why does concentration matter more than in traditional SEO?
Because the retriever picks one to three sources and stops. In classical search, moving from position twelve to eight gains you some click share. In AI answers, the fourth-best source is not slightly less visible. It is absent.
Why do you only cover six industries?
Because we can say something specific about those six. Adding a vertical because a keyword exists produces a page that repeats the same service description with a different noun, which is the pattern we removed from this site's own plan.
Can you work outside these six?
Sometimes, and we will say so honestly on the call. If we have no source-landscape knowledge in your category the first month is slower and we would rather price that in than pretend otherwise.
How long before a new brand appears in AI answers in a competitive category?
Thirty to sixty days for first movement is a common reported range in SaaS. Displacing an established incumbent source in a concentrated category takes considerably longer, and we set that expectation before an engagement rather than during it.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from one of the following. Where a claim is ours rather than a source’s, it carries an evidence label instead.
- Semrush — AI visibility study, January to April 2026. Source for the finding that only 36 global brands held top-100 visibility across all four dominant engines, and for the category concentration figures. Independent study
- EMGI — SaaS AI Citation Gap Report 2026, 120 keywords, ChatGPT with web grounding, collected 5–8 April 2026, US English only. Source for the finding that 44% of Google’s top-ranking SaaS brands were absent from ChatGPT answers. Limitations stated by the author. Independent study
- Rankability — State of AI Search, 1,645 citation observations across 31 topics, 2026. Source for cross-platform overlap and structural citation signals. Independent study
- Google Search Central — Optimizing your website for generative AI features (15 May 2026, updated 10 July 2026). Primary
- Searlixa sampling across client engagements, labelled Observed with sample and date. Our own
Ask an assistant
Hand this page to an assistant and ask it to summarise or challenge the argument. If it gets something wrong about us, that is itself a useful finding.
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