Two acquisitions, one major product launch, and a real shift in which AI model shoppers and buyers actually use, all inside about eight weeks. This is our first quarterly lookback: the handful of Q2 2026 events that changed something for brands trying to show up in AI search, and what we think each one actually means once the press releases settle.
Key Takeaways Q: What happened in AI search this quarter? A: Two major acquisitions, Adobe buying Semrush and Sitecore buying Scrunch, and HubSpot's launch of a standalone AEO product, all landed within about eight weeks of each other, alongside a real shift in market share between ChatGPT and Gemini. Q: Does this change what brands should actually do? A: Not the fundamentals. It confirms AI search visibility is now core marketing infrastructure rather than a side experiment, and that watching a single model is no longer enough. Q: Should a brand rush to buy one of these new tools? A: A monitoring dashboard tells you where you stand. It doesn't fix anything by itself. The content and data work still has to happen after. Q: What's the single most actionable takeaway? A: Stop measuring visibility on one model. Gemini's share grew enough this quarter that a ChatGPT-only view is already missing a meaningful part of the picture. |
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The Consolidation Quarter
On April 28, Adobe completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush, folding Semrush's visibility and discoverability tooling directly into Adobe's marketing stack.
Five weeks later, Sitecore acquired Scrunch for roughly $225 million, pairing Scrunch's AI monitoring platform with Sitecore's content and experience tools.
Two enterprise platforms buying their way into AI search visibility within six weeks of each other isn't a coincidence. It's confirmation that this is now core marketing infrastructure, the kind of category a large vendor can't afford to build slowly.
HubSpot Made It Official
A few weeks before either acquisition closed, HubSpot launched a standalone AEO product at its Spring 2026 Spotlight event, priced at $50 a month or bundled into Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise, built on last year's acquisition of XFunnel.
HubSpot has a track record of showing up early to a channel shift and then making it a default part of how marketing teams work. It did that with inbound marketing. It did that with SEO. Building a dedicated product here is the same signal, not a trend piece, an actual bet.
Whatever term a given vendor puts on the box, the discipline underneath it is the one we call GEO: structuring a brand's presence so AI systems can find it, trust it, and recommend it.
The Leaderboard Moved While Nobody Was Looking
ChatGPT is still the largest AI platform by a wide margin, but its lead is narrowing. ChatGPT's worldwide traffic share slipped to about 64.6% in January 2026, while Gemini climbed to roughly 22% of global AI website traffic over the same stretch.
That matters more than a market share headline suggests. Different models draw on different sources and can produce meaningfully different brand narratives, so a monitoring setup built around one platform is giving you a partial picture, and that gap just got wider.
What This Actually Means If You're Not Adobe or HubSpot
It's easy to read a quarter like this and conclude the problem is solved, that a big enough platform now owns AI visibility end to end. It isn't, and none of it does.
A monitoring dashboard, whichever vendor's logo is on it, tells you where you stand. It doesn't rewrite your FAQ sections, fix your structured data, or earn your next citation. That work still sits with the brand, and it still has to happen after the dashboard shows the gap, not instead of it.
What to Actually Do About It This Quarter
Check your model coverage. If your visibility tracking still centers on ChatGPT alone, Gemini's growth this quarter means you're missing a real and growing share of the picture.
Re-run whatever benchmark you have. The leaderboard moved once already this quarter. A benchmark from January is already stale.
Treat a new tool purchase as step one, not the finish line. The vendors consolidating this quarter are selling visibility into the problem. Closing it is still your team's work.
If you want a starting point for that audit rather than building one from scratch, Geckocheck's Brand Intelligence tracks your presence across the models that actually matter for your category, and updates as the leaderboard keeps moving.
