Making AI Search Profitable — Why Your Brand Website Is the Right Place to Start — and the Wrong Place to Stop

2026 — The year of the AI Blood Bath

In less than 12 months, thousands of brands have jumped into AI Search. Prompted by Boards, their bosses and billions of people now using Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini, "wait and see" is no longer an option. With trillions in commitments to profitable AI Search, the race is on.

Success in AI Search goes far beyond the Brand's website. As this learning becomes pervasive, expect a blood bath for AI Search companies only offering dashboards, one example of mounting investor expectations for action, automation, and attribution.

Applying Topic Intelligence for the Brand website GEO

For sure, a Brand focusing on its own website to improve its AI Search visibility is a critical foundation. The changes needed in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) however, often extend far beyond the homepage.

In GEO, a brand's website takes on added importance as a source of canonical product information, claims control, and signal consistency. While website schemas can make crawling a website easier, signals that actually move the needle for LLM recommendations often live in topic-relevant content.

Brands as the source of truth for their own product line is a missed opportunity. At XEO360, we've found through recurring audits of the citation sources LLMs use to make recommendations, that the most impactful content is category-defining topic content — not just product pages.

In energy drinks, that could be caffeine safety. In the drugstore cosmetics category, that could be serum solutions. In hair repair that could be hair bonding. Extending this "Topic Intelligence" across your owned properties is essential.

This presents opportunities for any Brand to materially increase the % Share of Voice (SOV) of its website by creating category-relevant topic or keyword content through blogs, how-to guides, listicles, and more.

The Truth: Brand websites drive only 3% of LLM visibility in citation sources

After XEO360 aggregating every LLM response across our August 2025 — January 2026 query runs, the brand's website now only accounts for 3% of all citation sources on ChatGPT for US and UK. On Gemini, the picture is similar.

This speaks to two inconvenient truths. Firstly, brands are typically missing a huge opportunity to own the broader category conversation by creating topic relevant content at the top of the funnel. Second, even when they do, LLMs cite a wide ecosystem of sources — and your website is just one of them.

Why Brand websites alone won't cut it

LLMs privilege independent validation, repetition across domains, and comparative framing when deciding what information to surface and cite. Like vetting resumes for a job, only a tiny % make it through.

This is not accidental. LLMs are trained to infer trust from signal convergence: when multiple unrelated sources independently reinforce the same attributes, benefits, or cautions, confidence rises. When only one source (your website) says it, trust stays low.

This isn't a failure of Brand websites; it's a function of how LLMs evaluate trust. Brand websites are structurally disadvantaged because they are single-party sources with no (brand) comparative context. Optimizing the brand website is necessary but insufficient.

Profitable AI Search requires brands to deliberately engineer distributed credibility — ensuring that the same category-defining claims, benefits, and proof points appear consistently across the sources that LLMs actually cite.

Making AI Search profitable for your Brand

Prioritizing the sources driving LLM citations is the first step your Brand should take.

These vary materially across different LLMs and across different verticals (e.g., Beauty vs Food & Beverage). They also vary by market. For an XEO360 Beauty client, the top 10 sources alone can illustrate where to focus.

The good news? The top 10 sources can account for up to 45% of all citations, meaning raising your Brand's visibility on these will have a disproportionate impact.

Further, for CPG in particular, many of these sources, including Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Walmart, and yes, your own Brand website, can be directly or indirectly influenced by actions you can take.

Pushback from early Brand adopters of vanilla AI Search dashboards includes the following:

• Action — "Don't just give me an AI Search dashboard, show me what specific actions to take."
• Automation — "There's no way my team can execute across these actions."
• Attribution — "Without measurement, there is no business case."

So, where does your Brand sit on its AI Search journey?

Over the next series of posts, we'll be unpacking these areas with rich examples of early Brand successes and failures. This space is moving fast; for example, in just the past 90 days, Amazon has dropped LLM-specific initiatives and the landscape continues to shift.

We'd love to hear from you if you're keen to explore AI Search profitability or, even better, share your learnings.

For sure, it's going to be a wild ride in 2026.

Ready to make AI Search profitable for your brand? Book a demo to see how XEO360 can help with action, automation, and attribution.