What the data shows [Study]

Manufacturing SEO has helped industrial brands rank on Google and reach their customers for years. Now, AI answers are recommending brands and changing the way these companies get found from the internet. 

We pulled data on AI Overviews, traffic trends, and AI mentions and citations to see who’s leading in different metrics. 

The short answer is that legacy brands are leading with the most mentions across AI answers. 

But the sites earning AI citations aren’t the same ones earning the mentions.

And while AI Overviews are still growing, referral traffic from AI is another story. 

Key takeaways:

• AI Overviews are growing across manufacturing searches. Google’s AI Overviews now appear on 57% of tracked manufacturing-related search volume, up 19 points from 38%.
• AI search still drives a small share of total website traffic. Just 0.48% of all sessions to manufacturing sites originate from AI search tools or assistants.
• Being mentioned isn’t the same as being cited. Of the 15 top domains by each metric, only two appear on both the “most-mentioned brands” and “most-cited sources” lists.
• ChatGPT and Google cite sources differently. The domain ChatGPT cites most often barely ranks on Google and doesn’t appear in Google’s top-cited sources at all.
• Citations don’t reliably translate to traffic. Some sites are attracting meaningful AI traffic, but the number of mentions or citations in AI answers doesn’t correlate cleanly with more AI-driven visits.

Methodology summary

This report combines three Semrush datasets, each measuring a different part of AI-driven discovery.

1. Keyword and SERP data: To track how much AI Overviews are growing their presence across common Google searches in this sector
2. Clickstream data: To measure the actual traffic channels sending people to websites in this sector as a whole
3. AI mentions and citations: To measure the top-cited and top-mentioned manufacturing brands and domains across the Semrush AI visibility database 

AI Overviews are growing across manufacturing search

Across a set of 458 manufacturing and industrial keywords, AI Overviews grew from 38% of all search volume in January 2026 to 57% in July. 

AI Overviews are becoming a more normal part of a search results page in this sector. 

They’re not just showing up for informational searches like “what is a transformer.” 

Some of the search terms we saw gain an AI Overview in this time period were specific product queries like “pneumatic cylinder” and “csla2gf.” 

We also saw searches for manufacturing brands like “National Instruments” gain an AI Overview. 

We know that AI Overviews can deter clicks to websites, so the expectation would be that, at a high level, organic traffic is declining. 

Nearly 80% of manufacturing & industrial traffic is direct or organic search

Clickstream data shows how much traffic goes to a set of domains, and from which channels. 

Overall traffic to these domains has fluctuated some, mostly driven by changes in direct traffic. 

The top two channels, direct and organic search, accounted for nearly 80% of all sessions to manufacturing sites. 

We’re still very much in the early stages of AI-referred traffic to websites in this industry, with AI Mode and AI assistants combining for just under half a percent of all traffic. 

Despite this sector’s low level of AI traffic, direct traffic share is growing while organic search traffic is declining. 

Even if demand for industrial and manufacturing services is consistent, the way people navigate to those websites is changing due to the rise of zero-click search and other platforms.

Despite the low traffic share across the market, brands can still benefit from getting visibility in those AI answers.

Our survey of 600+ B2B professionals showed that B2B buyers are already using AI to shortlist vendors and inform purchases worth over $1,000.

Buyers say they often follow up on an AI conversation by using Google search or making a direct visit to a website of a brand that was mentioned in the answer. The tricky part for marketers is that this delayed visit won’t be easy to measure with traditional analytics. 

Gaetano DiNardi calls this the “dark SEO funnel.” AI visibility does have an influence on buyer research and traffic, but it’s not as easy to track as typical organic traffic. 

Signals like growing direct traffic or branded search traffic could indicate an improvement in AI visibility, even without the AI referrals showing up. 

So, if your brand is mentioned in AI answers, you could be earning visibility that pays off in the long run. 

Brand mentions and cited sources are two different rankings

Using the Semrush AI Visibility database, we benchmarked the top brands being mentioned and cited in AI answers.

The manufacturing brands with the most volume of mentions are largely not the same as the sites AI platforms cite as sources. 

Note: A mention is a brand’s name showing up in the text of the AI answer. A citation is a link AI can point to as a source for the answer it generated. 

The top-mentioned brands — 3M, John Deere, and Boeing — are names people already trust before they ever type a prompt. 

In fact, most of these brands were around 100 years before OpenAI or Gemini even existed.

And with a wide range of business lines and products, these brands could be relevant to a huge number of prompts across different topics. So, the top-mentioned brands are no surprise. 

The top citations list, on the other hand, was more interesting. 

The gap between AI citations and AI mentions

Only two brands, Vevor and Grainger, appear on both the top 15 mentions list and the top 15 citations list.

The domains earning the citations aren’t the same household names that earn all the mentions.

Instead, they’re a mix of industry directories, brands, distributors, and reference sites. 

Domain	Site type
engineerfix.com	Reference / editorial site
vevor.com	Manufacturing brand / retailer
thermofisher.com	Manufacturing brand
sigmaaldrich.com	Manufacturing brand
made-in-china.com	B2B manufacturing marketplace
rs-online.com	Industrial product distributor
thebluebook.com	Industry directory (construction)
grainger.com	Industrial product distributor
thomasnet.com	Industry directory
procore.com	Construction management software
rsc.org	Professional membership org that publishes chemical science journals
protoolreviews.com	Power tools review publication
globalspec.com	Industry directory (engineering)
carrier.com	Manufacturing brand
energysage.com	Energy comparison marketplace

While these domains lead in citations, that didn’t translate translate into consistent levels of AI traffic.

One reason why: An AI citation for a marketplace page isn’t the same as a citation for an educational article on a reference site. 

Top-mentioned brands have consistent authority, top-cited sources don’t

At a glance, there’s a simple difference between the list of top-mentioned brands and top-cited sources. 

The top mentions are all strong manufacturing product brands from established businesses, while the top-cited domains were more of a mixed bag of domain types.

To look at it another way, we checked the Authority Score of the top-mentioned and cited domains. 

Note: Authority Score is Semrush’s proprietary method of scoring how trusted a domain is, based on organic traffic, backlinks, and spam signals. 

Overall, we saw a much stronger consistency of Authority Score across the top-mentioned domains than the top-cited sources. 

The top-mentioned brands more consistently show signs of SEO authority. 

However, there’s more variety of authority among the top-cited sources — especially with the top-cited source (engineerfix.com) only having a score of 17. Meanwhile, made-in-china.com had a higher Authority Score (77) than any of the top-mentioned brands.

The takeaway from this is that website authority may correlate more with being mentioned by AI than being cited.

That’s good news if you want to earn more AI mentions with the same strategy that builds your website authority. 

Different AI platforms tell different stories

Something else we saw with this high-level view was just how different each LLM behaves when citing sources and naming brands. 

Again, we see more consistency across the top-mentioned brands than the top-cited sources. Most of the LLMs had the same top-mentioned brands, but with a different variety of top-cited sources. 

It’s easy to see just how disproportionately engineerfix.com is cited compared to the rest of the sources. It dwarfs the other top sources on ChatGPT, but it doesn’t crack the top-cited sources on any of Google’s AI search platforms (Gemini, AI Mode, or AI Overviews). 

Why one website gets cited by ChatGPT but not Google’s AI platforms

One website in the study, engineerfix.com, got cited heavily by ChatGPT despite a low profile on Google, possibly because of its large footprint on other search engines. 

Semrush shows that the site currently only ranks for about 3,700 keywords on Google (and barely any estimated traffic).

The historical estimated traffic trend shows the site had a quick uptick around the spring of 2022 before dropping back down. 

But that’s not the end of the story.

Despite the small Google footprint, the site still pulls close to 300K monthly organic search visits according to Semrush Traffic Analytics.

How is that possible? Google isn’t the only source of organic traffic. 

Semrush’s Traffic Journey graph shows that DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo are responsible for over 68% of all traffic to the site. Meanwhile, Google accounts for less than 2%.

This shows how AI visibility doesn’t look exactly the same on every platform. OpenAI has its own partnerships and methods of citing sources and collecting training data that inform its answers. Google has its own methods, too. And search engines like DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo can also play a role. 

For marketers, a strategy that wins citations on ChatGPT might not win citations on AI Overviews at the same rate. Different systems lead to different results. To know the full picture, expand your lens beyond just Google. 

More mentions doesn’t mean more AI traffic

The top mention and citation numbers and industry-wide traffic mix show the macro-level view of visibility metrics, but they don’t quite connect the dots between AI visibility leading to AI traffic. 

While the top-mentioned brands were mostly legacy manufacturers of products, the top-cited domains were a variety of brands, marketplaces, publishers, and reference websites. 

We used Semrush clickstream data to check the AI traffic going to the top-mentioned domains over the same period of seven months.

More brand mentions don’t automatically translate to more AI traffic. 

Vevor.com and grainger.com both show AI traffic that rivals or exceeds what you’d expect from their mention counts, and siemens.com’s AI traffic bar actually exceeds its mentions count entirely. 

The top-cited domains also have little direct correlation to AI traffic. 

While engineerfix.com leads on its heavy ChatGPT citations, it gets only a fraction of the AI-referred traffic that domains further down the list get. 

Grainger, meanwhile, is one of only two domains on both the mentions and citations lists, and its AI traffic performs at a high level compared to the other top-cited and mentioned domains. 

Made-in-china.com and rsc.org also had some of the most AI traffic among the top-cited sources. 

Again, this is what makes measuring AI visibility harder than reporting on SEO. Just because your brand is mentioned and recommended on AI doesn’t mean the visit will go through the AI referral and convert right away. AI traffic isn’t a direct result of more mentions and citations the way organic traffic typically follows higher SEO rankings.

These brands are certainly winning a high level of visibility, but what comes after that visibility? Are they visible across prompts that are informational or commercially driven? 

Let’s look closer at some examples, starting with the top-cited domain engineerfix. 

This reference site is full of detailed guides and FAQ-style content for a wide variety of engineering topics.

But other than reading the articles, there’s not really any explicit action a person would want to take on the site. So there’s no real incentive to follow up and click on its citations. 

Made-in-china, on the other hand, is an online marketplace with a massive catalog that spans industrial and consumer categories. 

If this website is being cited in an AI answer, it could be helping someone make a purchase or find a product they’re looking for on that site. 

Same with Grainger. As a major distributor, it gives buyers who follow a citation link somewhere to place an order. One of Grainger’s top individual pages driving AI traffic is this product page for a Motorola two-way radio:

For rsc.org, the top-cited domain with the highest level of AI traffic, the situation is different again. This site is for the Royal Society of Chemistry, a professional membership organization that also publishes scientific journals and resources. 

According to this site’s Visibility Overview, pages getting cited most often are in an /element/ subfolder, with individual pages for elements of the periodic table like neon, iron, lithium, chlorine, and dozens more.

But according to the Top Pages report, the pages earning the most clicks are the peer-reviewed research papers in their /content/ subfolder. These articles cover in-depth and emerging research on topics like PFAS chemistry, composite materials, and biodegradable coatings. 

This site is clearly an authoritative source for its industry. Publishing original research and reference guides that are dense and specific offers something an AI answer can’t replicate on its own. 

The reference content on engineerfix, on the other hand, is more generic and therefore easier for AI to summarize. As a result, there’s less incentive for a reader to click the citation link. 

What does that mean?

It’s not that reference or educational content in the manufacturing and industrial fields can’t earn traffic from citations. But generic, easily summarized reference content doesn’t have an inherent reason for a click after being cited. Meanwhile, original scientific research offers more of a reason to click and read more from the source. 

The takeaway for manufacturing marketers

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to growing AI visibility. Each metric should be targeted and interpreted differently. 

AI mentions reflect trust in a brand, and monitoring those will give you directional insight into your brand’s relevance. AI citations can drive traffic, but only when the source gives readers a clear next step. Ultimately, the sector as a whole is still getting most of its traffic from direct and organic search visits. 

But those visits are likely to be more informed by AI conversations as adoption grows. 

Here’s your action plan:

• To grow your AI mentions, focus on building topical authority through an SEO foundation and a brand reputation people can trust.
• Identify the domains in your niche that AI cited the most, then look for ways to partner with them. For manufacturers, this could be distributors, directories, and industry-specific marketplace sites.
• When creating content for AI visibility, go beyond generic summaries to give readers a reason to click.

It’s still early. But the SEO fundamentals manufacturing brands have already been building are a foundational part of how AI visibility and traffic are playing out. 

Full methodology

1. Keyword and SERP data

We started with the top 20 manufacturing domains in our Trending Websites ranking, pulled the top 1,000 keywords from each domain, and kept only the keywords where at least two of these domains had a top ranking. That gave us a set of 458 keywords where we collected historical monthly snapshots from January through July 2026 to measure how often Google results for major manufacturing queries contained an AI Overview. When measuring the impact of AI Overviews on these searches, we weighted by search volume, and not keyword count. 

2. Clickstream data

To measure actual traffic going to websites in this sector as a whole, we measured the traffic channels of U.S. sessions to sites across ten manufacturing categories (chemicals, civil engineering, construction and maintenance, equipment and supplies, machinery, manufacturing, plastics and polymers, renewable energy, transportation and logistics, and warehousing) from January through July 2026.

3. AI mentions and citations

Using the Semrush AI Visibility database, we looked at domains in the US manufacturing and industrial vertical from January through July 2026 across four LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, and AI Overviews). For each month, we pulled the top 25 domains by mentions and the top 25 by citations, then tracked the aggregate. The number of mentions and citations are counted across all prompts in the US database. To compare the top-cited and top-mentioned domains with AI traffic, we used Semrush’s Traffic and Market Toolkit to capture each domain’s AI traffic over the seven month period. The three datasets represent separate stages of discovery to give a high-level directional view of how this industry is being impacted by AI-driven search and discovery.