IMPACT: How AI Assistants Shape Brand Visibility

IMPACT reported on 20 November 2025 that Pulp Strategy had released the GEO Benchmark Index 2025, a study powered by NeuroRank, of how AI assistants shape brand discovery, trust, and competitive strength. The report focuses on the mismatch between what brands publish and what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity retain and interpret.

Brands publish one story and AI retains another

IMPACT presents the study’s central finding as a gap. Brands publish information about themselves, and AI systems keep and interpret a different version of it. The four assistants are becoming the main layer through which consumers and businesses learn about brands, so that gap decides what a buyer meets first.

The research evaluated 70 full-spectrum LLM visibility audits covering more than 350 brands, through 408,000 prompt simulations and insights from more than 60 CMOs. Ambika Sharma told IMPACT the work took more than four months and over 100 conversations with marketing leaders across industries.

 Four patterns of failure

The report groups the findings under four headings:

• severe invisibility, where 68 percent of brands are missing from critical category searches;

• factual distortion, where 52 percent of brands meet hallucinated or incorrect details;

• sentiment bias, where 90 percent of consumer brands receive overly negative summaries;

• and identity drift, where 88 percent of brands show inconsistent naming or recall across models.

It links these gaps to content formats machines cannot read, such as PDFs, outdated structures, and unstructured pages, which weaken AI trust signals and leave brand representation incomplete in knowledge graphs.

AI search shapes high-value decisions

The report treats AI search as a primary channel. It argues that AI answers already shape procurement decisions, investor viewpoints, and high-intent consumer research. For regulated sectors, IMPACT adds compliance concerns, procurement blind spots, and misaligned investor narratives. The study ended on a 30 to 90 day improvement roadmap.

NeuroRank’s research has since moved on to the AI Visibility Index 2026.

Ambika Sharma’s statement to IMPACT described what the research showed.