In our previous study, we found that AI visibility is a topic-level game. Winning a single prompt doesn’t automatically make you the brand ChatGPT connects with a category.
This study asks the next question: once you’ve built that kind of authority in one category, does it carry over into related ones?
If your brand becomes a common answer in “small business banking,” does that make it more likely to show up in “business credit cards” or “small business loans”?
The short answer: it depends on whether you’re measuring citations or brand mentions. In the brands we analyzed, citations tended to spread more readily across categories than brand mentions did. And the brand’s expertise and depth in a category shaped how far its authority appeared to travel.
Key takeaways
- Among the brands we analyzed, a domain could be cited in almost any category if its content met the kind of source criteria ChatGPT relies on (relevance, authority, freshness). Getting mentioned by name in ChatGPT tended to happen mostly in categories close to a brand’s core expertise.
- For brand mentions specifically, depth in a category tended to matter more than breadth. Brands that consistently appeared across a category’s prompts in ChatGPT were the ones associated with successful expansion into new categories. Showing up once in 20 categories didn’t appear to build a higher brand-mention share.
- Industry shaped the pattern. In the brands we analyzed, finance and real estate saw broader coverage associated with more citations. Legal and healthcare set a higher bar: even full prompt coverage and repeat citations didn’t reliably translate into brand-mention share.
- Topical authority tended to give brands a stronger starting point when expanding into adjacent categories, not a free pass into unrelated ones. Expansion worked best when the next category was genuinely close to one the brand already answered well.
| A quick, yet important disclaimer: Growing your topical authority is associated with stronger visibility, though it’s one factor among several. Writing style, content quality, originality, overall brand authority, and third-party mentions all play a role too. |
Methodology
We partnered with Kevin Indig and Growth Memo again to analyze data from the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit.
The dataset covers 1,094 US categories tracked monthly in ChatGPT from January through June 2026, with five prompt variants per category.
It includes 283,215 domain-category citation observations and 76,493 brand-mention observations across January through May, plus 45,578 category-expansion appearances by 1,458 mapped brand entities.
Definitions
Two signals are tracked separately throughout the study:
- Citations are the sources ChatGPT links to as evidence in its answers
- Brand mentions are the brand names ChatGPT includes directly in the response text (which may be neutral, positive, or negative)
For the relatedness analysis, a brand’s “core expertise” is defined as any category where the brand had already appeared in at least three of five prompts before the target-month appearance.
“Category closeness” is calculated using semantic similarity between the target category’s prompts and the brand’s prior expert categories.
1. The bar for being mentioned is higher than the bar for being cited
When a brand in our study appeared in a topical category in ChatGPT, whether it was just cited or also mentioned by name depended heavily on how related the category was to its core expertise.
In categories close to the brand's core expertise, brands were cited as a source in 74% of appearances, mentioned in 44%, and both cited and mentioned in 34%. In categories distant from the brand's core expertise, those shares dropped to 50% cited, 25% mentioned and 9% both cited and mentioned.
Being cited as a source held up reasonably well across the distance (50% distant vs. 74% close). But being named alongside a citation was strongly tied to relatedness — cited-and-named appearances were nearly 4x higher in close categories than in distant ones.
The pattern was even sharper if you looked only at citations. Of the citations that happened in the least related categories, just 18% also included a named brand. In the most relevant, 46% did.
Related categories were more than twice as likely to turn a citation into a named-brand mention in this sample.
The takeaway: match your strategy to your goal. Publishing broadly can build citation presence, and that appears to work even in categories far from your core. But if you want ChatGPT to name your brand when a customer asks a question, focusing your effort on categories close to what you’re already known for tends to pay off more.
2. Depth matters more than breadth in ChatGPT for brand recognition
In our study, a brand could show up once in 20 categories and own none of them. Depth in one category was associated with a higher brand-mention share. Breadth across many categories, without depth, was not.
Citation share, however, responded to coverage either way. A brand that showed up in even one of a category’s five prompts tended to gain some citation share. A brand that showed up in all five gained more. In the sample, there was no obvious spread-thin penalty for citations.
Brand mentions behaved differently. A brand that appeared in only one of a category’s five prompts was associated with a drop in mention share. That penalty didn’t disappear until the brand reached at least three of five prompts in a category. Only after that did breadth stop hurting brand mentions.
“Being cited in many categories does not show a spread-thin effect in this sample. But brand recognition works differently. The categories where a brand consistently earns named mentions are the ones from which it can credibly expand.”
The takeaway: similarly, prioritize depth in a few categories over presence in many. The data doesn’t support the idea that a site can serve unlimited categories, but it also doesn’t support a universal cap. What it does support is a simple rule: earn repeat presence in a category before treating it as a launching pad for the next one.
3. Industry shapes how far authority spreads in ChatGPT
According to our data, how coverage breadth affects a brand’s presence in ChatGPT isn’t the same across industries.
In finance and real estate, wider coverage tended to hold more citation leverage. A brand that showed up in all five prompts in a category was associated with stronger citation share than one that showed up in only one.
That's not to say any finance or real estate brand can dominate every adjacent category. It just means that in these industries, spreading coverage across many categories didn't appear to hurt a brand's citation share.
Legal and healthcare set a higher bar. Their citation gains from broader coverage were weaker than in finance or real estate. And for brand mentions, coverage didn’t translate: even at full five-prompt coverage, mention share still trended negative in those fields. Being widely cited didn’t translate into being named.
How to plan topical category expansion in AI search
To expand successfully in AI search, don't chase every content topic. Start with the areas where you're already recognized, then expand outward in small, deliberate steps, focusing on what moves the needle for your brand.
Here’s how to plan an expansion move:
- Map where you already have authority. List the categories where your brand consistently earns both citations and named mentions across most of the related category prompts. Those are your anchor categories, not every category where you’ve appeared once.
Start by checking the topics you already appear for in Semrush’s Visibility Overview tool:
- Pick target categories that are genuinely close to your core. In this study, closeness was measured by semantic similarity between the anchor and the target category. In practice, that often means looking for categories where the customer, problem, product, and buying decision look similar and are directly relevant to your business.
Open the Topic Opportunities tab to see what you should focus on next:
- Focus on what earns brand mentions. To earn mentions in a new category, focus on clear brand positioning across your content, third-party coverage from credible sources (Reddit, review sites, industry publications, expert commentary), and evidence of expertise (author credentials, primary research, real product details). These weren’t tested directly in this study, but they are common signals that tend to impact AI visibility.
