Who gets the most love from AI? In the United States fashion industry, two brands kept popping up on AI search platforms: Nike and Adidas.

AI search platforms mentioned these athletic brands more than any other in the fashion and apparel category earlier this year, according to an AI visibility study from Semrush, an Adobe company.

Nike scored 2.2 million mentions and Adidas earned 1 million, reflecting the number of times the brands were mentioned in the answers produced by AI search platforms Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini.

To get these findings, Semrush analyzed 126 million U.S. AI search prompts from January through April this year, with a focus on 19 categories from news and entertainment to fashion and apparel.

In the eyes of AI agents, a mention is a different metric from a source citation. As the study explained it, AI can describe a brand without quoting the site, but it can also quote a site without naming the brand. A mention brings visibility, while a citation, which carries a link to a site, can generate traffic.

“Mentions come from brand authority and category fit. Citations come from content depth,” the study said. “The two don’t always move together. Wikipedia is heavily cited but rarely the brand AI is talking about.”

Despite getting the most mentions, Nike and Adidas did not get cited at the same rate. In fashion and apparel, Vogue was the top source with 1.2 million, followed by Poshmark with 951,000 and WhoWhatWear with 757,000.

The study reflects how AI has redefined brand visibility, as companies now look for ways to stay relevant in both the eyes of the public and AI.

“The new reality is your customers are both people and AI agents,” said Rachel Thornton, chief marketing officer at Adobe Enterprise.

Semrush found 36 brands—which it called the Universal 36—that appeared in the top 100 of each AI platform every month, led by internet giants YouTube (47.9 million), Google (31.5 million), and Reddit (25.8 million). Nike and Adidas were not part of the 36. The study said being part of the Universal 36 is more of a ceiling instead of a target.

According to the study, AI platforms don’t just rely on a brand’s official content. It also considers third-party sources such as customer reviews and community discussions to understand and recommend brands in its search results. This is why, the study said, it is important to have consistent messaging across these platforms, owned or otherwise.

Some brands already dominate the narrative AI tells. The study examined how concentrated each category is by measuring the share of top 10 mentions held by the top 3 brands. For example, news and media has the highest concentration with 82.9 percent. Fashion and apparel, for its part, has 58.8 percent.

Andrew Warden, vice president of marketing at Adobe, noted that brands need to adapt to the fact that AI is now an intrinsic part of the default search experience.

“The foundations of SEO [search engine optimization] are critically important in creating trust signals for AI, and without consistently reinforcing your narrative across digital channels, you’re still playing by yesterday’s rules,” he said.

“Organizations need to redesign their marketing functions and drive this forward together to meet this challenge,” he added.