In mid-October, ChatGPT rolled out a major response update that changed how brands appear in its answers. Using Answer Engine Insights, Profound analyzed millions of prompts across ChatGPT and other leading answer engines to understand what changed and how it affected brand visibility across categories.
What Changed
The analysis compares the weeks before and after October 18 for brands with visibility scores between 5% and 95%.
On Oct 18th, ChatGPT began consistently tagging brands as structured entities in its responses. As the chart below shows, the share of answers containing brand entity references spiked around October 18, marking the rollout of brand entity recognition through the new Entity["brand", ...] field.
At the same time, the average number of brand mentions per ChatGPT response dropped from around six–seven before the update to three–four after, reducing the number of brand options surfaced in each answer.
ChatGPT’s citations have grown more concentrated, with Wikipedia and Reddit now leading by a large margin. The rest of the cited domains trail far behind, showing that the long tail of sources has stretched even further. In earlier snapshots, citations were more evenly distributed, but that balance eroded over time.
How Visibility Shifted
After the update, brand visibility scores in ChatGPT declined across the board. Average visibility fell by 31%, and more than 85% of brands saw decreases overall.
- 13% of brands saw large drops of more than 10 percentage points.
- 58% of brands experienced moderate declines between 2 and 10 points.
Across all rankings, the average score difference between positions shrank by roughly 23%. Within the top 10 brands across categories, the visibility gap between #1 and #10 also narrowed by 23%, meaning top brands are now closer together in visibility than before.
Below is an illustrative example of how visibility scores shifted for a specific category within the service industry.
Why It Matters
ChatGPT responses now surface fewer brand options overall, tightening visibility across categories. Most brands saw visibility scores decline, and the gap among top positions narrowed, creating a more competitive landscape within ChatGPT’s answers.
As AI platforms continue to evolve, brands need visibility strategies that can keep pace with the speed of change. Answer Engine Insights helps teams understand how their brands appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and beyond, keeping them discoverable and competitive as AI-generated answers redefine search.
Reach out to our team to see how Profound can help your brand stay ahead.
