The Profound Index is the definitive leaderboard for AI Search, built on 1.9+ billion real user conversations spanning 50+ industries across all major Answer Engines. Every season we mine that data for the questions on marketers' minds. This edition covers three: cross-market brand visibility, the impact of Q2 model updates on citation sources, and this quarter's biggest company movers.
Key findings
- Winning the US means nothing for Europe. In 24 of 30 multi-region industries, at least one European market crowned a #1 brand that never cracked the US top five. Airlines, banking, grocery, insurance, gyms, and real estate showed the clearest local patterns, meaning a single-market operator's US rank says little about its standing abroad.
- Only seven brands led globally. Toyota and McDonald's ranked #1 in every available market. Shell, IKEA, Marriott, Skyscanner, and Amazon showed broad but not universal reach. Every other category was decided locally, which means AI visibility strategy in Europe has to be built market by market.
- Local leadership tracked local citations. In markets where a net-new regional brand led, 46-59% of citations went to country-specific domains, versus 12-17 points lower where no local brand led. Translating content is not enough to move AI visibility across borders.
- June's ChatGPT update rebuilt the source layer, not the leaderboard. Citations per answer fell 10.4% and unique cited domains dropped in 56 of 58 industries, yet nine of ten leading brands in the median industry held their position. A brand can keep its AI rank while losing the publications that used to support it.
- This quarter's biggest movers spanned cybersecurity to ecommerce. Oasis Security nearly doubled its share of cybersecurity mentions (+99.9%), Gorgias jumped from 19th to 6th in ecommerce, and HubSpot took the top spot in prompts that cut across every topic.
Access the full report for the complete regional brand rankings, model-by-model citation analysis, and topic-level scorecard of Q2's largest gains and declines.