Brand Is the #1 CMO Priority for 2026. AI Search Is #17. That Gap Is the Problem.

Two numbers that do not sit well together

McKinsey just put out their State of Marketing Europe report — 500 senior marketers — and there are two findings in it that contradict each other if you read them side by side.

Brand is the number one priority. 72% are putting more budget behind it. Fine, makes sense, I would do the same. Generic AI content has flooded every channel and real brand authority is scarcer than it has been in years.

But AI came in 17th. Out of 20. So the people whose job is building brand are treating the place buyers actually form opinions about brands as barely worth their attention this year. McKinsey themselves said the ranking underestimates how much it matters, which is a polite way of saying the room is looking the wrong way.

What actually happens when someone evaluates a vendor now

Think about how a buyer evaluates software today. They do not open ten tabs. They ask ChatGPT or Perplexity what the best tools for X are, they get back a handful of names with reasons attached, and that is the shortlist. They bring it into a meeting.

Nobody clicked your site. Nobody filled in a form. If you are not in that answer, you are not in the conversation — and the worst part is you cannot even see that it did not happen. There is no bounced visit, no missing lead in the CRM to point at. The pipeline just quietly does not exist.

Brand and AI visibility are not competing priorities

This is why I do not love how the question usually gets framed, as if it is brand versus AI and you have to choose. You do not.

The stuff that makes an AI recommend you — real research, content that is actually structured, other people vouching for you — is the same stuff that builds brand in the first place. They are one investment routed through two different surfaces. The companies treating them as two separate departments that never talk are going to be mediocre at both and not understand why.

The part most people have not clocked: there is no single AI shortlist

Here is the bit that genuinely changes the strategy. There is not one AI answer to optimize for. ChatGPT gives one set of recommendations, Perplexity gives a different one, Google's AI gives another — same question, different vendors, because they pull from completely different sources.

In our own testing across B2B industries, the overlap between what ChatGPT and Perplexity cite for the same query was under 10%. I see it constantly: a company looks healthy on one engine and is nowhere on another for the exact same question. So being visible in AI is not even a single question. The real one is which of these engines you are winning and which is quietly handing your category to a competitor while you are not looking. Almost nobody can answer that, because they are measuring the brand half and ignoring the distribution half entirely.

Three questions worth sitting with this quarter

If you run marketing, it is worth actually checking rather than assuming. When your buyer asks an AI about your category, are you in the answer — on all the engines, or just the one you happened to try once?

How much of your content is built to get cited by a machine versus just read nicely by a human who is increasingly not the first one looking? And who actually owns this at your company — because if the honest answer is "the SEO team, probably," that is the gap.

Brand still wins. But.

Brand still wins. More than ever, honestly. But it does not matter how good the argument is if it never gets made in the room where the decision happens — and that room is increasingly an AI answer your buyer trusts before they ever reach you.

The free GEO Audit at getaicited.co runs a citation baseline across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude — so you can see which engines name you and which name your competitors instead. If you want to know where you actually stand, that is the place to start.