Singapore

Big brand AI search dominance, and the questions it leaves open

If you run a smaller publisher or an SME marketing team in Singapore, the practical question behind a geo agency singapore quote is whether AI answers have any room left for you.

They do, on questions a big brand does not answer well. The aeo work a small site needs starts from that sentence. BrightEdge's travel study, reported by Search Engine Journal in late October, found American Airlines, Royal Caribbean and Expedia leading their categories across both Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Its more useful finding for a small site is that dominance loosens where a question asks for judgement and lived detail. Share of voice in that study means the share of tracked AI answers where a brand appears, not a ranking position, since an AI answer does not rank individual results the way a search page does.

As of November 2026, the published evidence in this space is a small set of travel studies, one of them with a sample caveat I set out below. Read the figures as a hypothesis about your own niche, never as a forecast of your share.

Key takeaways

Category leadership in AI answers is not stable: Hilton leads hotels on Google AI Overviews at 28.3% and Marriott leads ChatGPT at 29.4%, and the two engines were measured with different prompt sets.
Budget questions are the hardest entry: booking platforms take 78% of budget-related Google AI Overviews answers.
Booking-intent prompts account for only 9% of the tracked Google AI Overviews sample, so most of the question space sits outside the toughest contest. Any geo agency singapore brief should start by mapping that space rather than chasing the category leader.
Experience-led questions are the realistic entry point, if the site can publish evidence a big brand will not publish.
A mention in an answer and a visible citation of your page are different outcomes and need separate counts.

What the travel data measured

I read a headline number against its definition before anything else. BrightEdge describes its source as the AI Hyper Cube, built from US English holiday travel prompts in the autumn months of 2026. Three limits follow, and a Singapore reader should carry all of them into any comparison.

The panel is US English, so the prompts are American holiday queries rather than local buying questions. The window is two months of one season. And the category rankings use a different measure from the intent and budget findings, which the source calls a separate, prompt-based measure. Results describe observed visibility, not bookings or market share.

The engines are not on equal footing either. BrightEdge states plainly that the two engines were measured with different prompt sets. That explains how hotel leadership can flip between platforms without either brand changing anything, and it rules out reading a two-engine comparison as a clean A/B test.

One more limit sits in the fine print. BrightEdge limits its category rankings to hotels, airlines, booking platforms and cruise lines, with non-travel platforms such as YouTube and Reddit excluded. So the published dominance story is about one competitor type, other travel brands. The forums and video channels people read before they book sit outside the table.

A person at a desk marks two printed charts side by side with a highlighter, a laptop open nearby.

Reading the leadership numbers

The leaders look settled until you check the margins. American Airlines leads airlines at 26.6% on Google AI Overviews, with a margin of 6.1 points over United there, and the leader's share is under a third of the tracked answers.

Category	Leader on Google AI Overviews	Leader on ChatGPT
Airlines	American Airlines (26.6%)	American Airlines
Hotels	Hilton (28.3%)	Marriott (29.4%)
Booking platforms	Expedia (31.3%)	Expedia (narrower margin)
Cruise lines	Royal Caribbean (24.8%)	Royal Caribbean

Expedia's lead over Kayak on Google AI Overviews is 31.3% against 14.4%, a multiple of 2.2x, while the same gap on ChatGPT is smaller. The ordering holds on both engines. The size of the gap does not, and a plan built on one ratio will be wrong on the other engine. Anyone who has signed a retainer on the strength of one platform's report should keep that pair of ratios in their notes.

The honest reading is that "big brands dominate" describes the direction of the data, not a fixed gap you can plan around. A brand at 2.2x on one engine is in a different contest from the same brand on the next. That instability is where a smaller site has room, because one question can be refreshed in days where a category page takes a quarter.

Two parallel race tracks where the leading runner holds a visibly different gap in each.

Why the league table matters less than the question

The far more useful cut is the one by question intent. Booking platforms appear in 38% of booking-intent prompts in the tracked Google AI Overviews sample. The closer a question sits to a transaction, the more likely the answer names a platform.

That rate is worth setting against the budget finding, because the two together describe where the crowd is. Booking platforms appear in 78% of budget-related Google AI Overviews answers, and Expedia alone appears in 44% of the budget-related answers. Words such as cheap, deal, budget or last-minute sit at the centre of that cluster.

Hold the source's own caution: this is an observed association, not evidence that using price vocabulary causes a brand to appear. What it gives you is a map of where competition concentrates, not a writing recipe.

Which of your questions you can actually win

Here is the test I would put in front of a client before any GEO proposal, and it is the part an agency round-up rarely explains. Split your live buyer questions by what the answer needs.

The first bucket holds questions with an agreed, easy-to-verify answer: opening hours, a standard term, published prices, a list of providers in an area. Answers to these are built from consensus sources, and consensus sources belong to whoever has the widest citation footprint. Expect an uphill fight and give them low priority unless they convert unusually well.

The second bucket holds questions where the right answer depends on someone having done the work: what went wrong on a project, what a process costs once exceptions are counted, which option fails under a condition buyers keep hitting. These answers need evidence tied to a real engagement, and a big brand's centralised content team rarely publishes that for a single market.

The same panel supports that split. Platforms such as YouTube, Reddit and AAA appear more prominently in inspiration questions, while hotels and cruise lines feature more heavily in comparison questions. The engine does reach outside the brand set when a question asks for experience, and a smaller site competes there with one engagement described in detail, where a brand page has to speak for a whole portfolio.

The working test is small on purpose. Take buyer questions real customers have asked, tag each as consensus or experience, run them through the engine your buyers use, and record whether your brand appears at all. Keep the count small enough to enumerate by hand and you learn where your material already exists. If one bucket returns mentions and the other returns none, the opening is in front of you.

A person at a wooden table sorting small paper cards into two piles by hand, a laptop beside them.

Counting a mention against a citation

A mention settles very little until you know which of two events produced it. The engine either fetched your page and left you out of the answer, or fetched it and quoted it. Most reports I see fold both into one line, usually the one that reads better in a deck.

The arithmetic is short enough to print beside the number. Mention rate is the number of valid answers containing your brand divided by valid answers asked under the same conditions. Source occurrence rate is the number of valid answers where your own site appears divided by that same group. No-source answers and missing data get their own line, never a zero.

The conditions belong in the same table: reporting period, question version, engine, sample size and failure count. Take one of them away and a month-on-month move cannot be attributed to anything. A question reworded between runs is a different question, and comparing the two figures measures the edit rather than the work. Read it any other way and an aeo report becomes a trend line with no cause behind it.

Where Topkee's GEO method fits

Someone else's share of voice figure tells you where to look; it does not tell you what your own answers contain. That is the work a geo agency singapore retainer buys, and Topkee's GEO service is built to close the gap. Its method is easier to judge than a package name.

Topkee samples real buyer questions across the engines a client's customers use, analyses the sub-queries an engine returns and records which material is missing, then checks how the answer describes the brand's strengths and limits, counting a missing mention as neutral rather than negative. Its competitor comparison runs the identical question set against the brand and its competitors and records which sources appear, so a gap is identified per question instead of being inferred from advertiser size. Its AI browsing analysis keeps retrieved sources and visible citations on separate lines, which is the distinction this article asks readers to make. Prompt monitoring reports the period, question version, engine, sample size and failure count, with the answer evidence retained.

The service states that it does not guarantee an AI recommendation, fixed exposure or query volume, and that engines are sampled through APIs, so a sample is not what every consumer sees. For a Singapore SME with a maintainable site and real cases, that scope is the honest baseline against which to judge any promise of an AI win.

A Singapore reason the opening is wider

The study is US English holiday travel. Singapore buyers ask their questions in English about local conditions, and a global brand's content set was not written against the questions a local audience actually asks. An engine answering a local question needs local material to quote.

Two habits are worth adopting. Write the question in the buyer's own words, including local phrasing, rather than translating a global template down. And keep each language version and each wording variant as its own tracked question, so a change in results can be traced to the version you edited. Folding the variants into one figure hides both. It is also why a aeo plan written for a global template rarely lands in a local market.

Recommended next step

Run the two-bucket test on paper first, before any content or retainer decision. Write down the questions your customers actually ask, tag each one as consensus or experience, and keep the list where you can see it change. Then read what the GEO service covers on the Topkee site and compare it against that list. A proposal that does not name your questions is one to question.

If the experience bucket looks thin because the site has no case material to quote, fix that first. A page describing one real engagement in detail is the raw material an AI answer can use, and no amount of monitoring makes it appear.

FAQ

Is AI search really dominated by big brands?

On the travel questions BrightEdge tracked, yes for category and budget questions. American Airlines, Royal Caribbean and Expedia lead their categories across both engines, and booking platforms appear in 78% of budget-related Google AI Overviews answers. The dominance is not uniform across question types.

Can a small site beat Hilton or Expedia in an AI answer?

Not where those brands own consensus coverage, and probably not on price comparisons. A small site can appear when a question needs experience, a specific process or a local detail a global brand page does not carry. Aim at a narrow set of such questions rather than a category.

Why does the leader change between ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?

Measurement is one published reason. BrightEdge states that the two engines were measured with different prompt sets, so a gap between them is partly a difference in what was asked. Hilton leads hotels on Google AI Overviews at 28.3% and Marriott leads on ChatGPT at 29.4%.

How do I measure whether my brand is winning an AI answer?

Count two things separately. Mention rate is valid answers containing your brand divided by valid answers under the same conditions; source occurrence rate is answers where your own site appears divided by that same group. Record period, question version, engine, sample size and failure count each time.

What should I ask a Singapore GEO or aeo partner before signing?

Ask what the partner will track, and ask for the answer evidence behind any claim. A aeo proposal worth reading names the buyer questions, the engines, the review period and how it separates a retrieved page from a cited one.