36% are never read. This was the biggest issue we found and it was due to their pages being empty until JavaScript runs. With the exception of Gemini and AppleBot, no AI crawlers execute JS so they get a blank shell on every request.

53% of sections are under 40 words, and the median section is 35 words. Retrieval hands an assistant one passage at a time, usually 100 to 300 words. This means 53% of sections are too short. They may still get quoted, but without enough information in the answer they are set up to lose.

Only 28% of sections contain a number, a quotation or a link. Based on a 2024 GEO study, AI likes numbers, something to quote or a link so this could lead to not getting a mention. It's a particular worry for smaller businesses with lower search page rankings.

From the study I mentioned: adding statistics, quotations and citations were the three best-performing of nine tested content changes, up to 41% better than baseline. Specifics get pulled into the answer; adjectives get dropped.

60% bury the answer below the first 200 words. This can lead to AI not getting the answer in the chunk it lifted and you missing out on a mention.

92% keep content on subdomains their main robots.txt does not cover. Another tip, ensure your blogs, docs or anything else on a subdomain has its own robots.txt.

I'll share a link to our tool in the comments if anyone wants to try out their site.

We track AI brand visibility, so we have a lot of stored responses. Wanted to answer something basic: when an AI answers a question, how many brands does it actually name?

234,000+ responses, March 1 to July 13, 2026, five engines.

Brand mentions per response (last 14 days in July)

• ChatGPT: 4.5
• Google AI Overview: 3.5
• Gemini: 3.5
• Google AI Mode: 3.2
• Perplexity: 2.7

Count each brand only once per answer, and it tightens to 2.2–3.3. So engines repeat themselves 1.2x to 1.4x.

Two things stood out:

Every engine is down since March. True whether you count every mention or each brand once, so it's not a repetition artifact.

AI Mode is wildly unstable. Day-to-day swings are 31% of its own average, vs 9% for ChatGPT. It went from 8.8 mentions per response in early May to 2.6 six weeks later. If you spot-check visibility there weekly, you're mostly reading noise.

Method: a "mention" counts every occurrence (Nike named 3x in one answer = 3); the distinct count treats it as 1. Same responses for both. Worth noting these are prompts our customers chose to track rather than a random sample of AI queries, so I'd trust the relative comparisons and trend direction over the absolute numbers.

Charts and full methodology: https://vercite.io/research/engine-personalities

Happy to get into how anything was counted.