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The Daily Carnage

may 5, 2026

Brand Amnesia 🤪

AI brand recos are chaotic.

Be in The Know

šŸ“ˆ Reddit’s ad business reported a 69% YOY revenue increase in Q1.

āœˆļø A Spirit Airlines fan has launched Spirit 2.0, a crowdsourcing effort to buy the airline.

šŸŽ§ Spotify identifies human creators with ā€œverifiedā€ checkmarks.

šŸ¤– Data: Gartner finds 40% of agentic AI projects will fail.

šŸ“Š Report: Google Ads CTR is rising, but conversions remain flat.

šŸŽ“ Syracuse University launches Creator Economy minor.

AI Gives Inconsistent Brand Recommendations

New research from SparkToro highlights a huge AI misconception: While we tend to think of tools like ChatGPT as consistent ā€œanswer engines,ā€ they actually behave more like probabilistic generators.

In controlled experiments with nearly 3,000 responses, identical prompts rarely produced the same list of brand or product recommendations (less than 1% of the time) and almost never in the same order.

We’re used to traditional SEO, which assumes stable rankings. But AI outputs appear to show variability in three dimensions: which brands appear, how many are listed, and how they’re ordered. So, ā€œtracking your positionā€ inside AI responses is pretty much meaningless. It’s not fixed.

But while rankings are chaotic, brands that consistently show up, regardless of position, are more strongly associated with a given intent in the model’s training and retrieval patterns.

Here’s what to know:

  • AI recommendations are non-deterministic. The same query yields different outputs almost every time.
  • Rank tracking is unreliable, as order and inclusion constantly change.
  • Prompt diversity amplifies chaos. Users phrase the same intent in wildly different ways.
  • Visibility share (frequency of mentions) is a more defensible metric than rank.
  • AI tools reflect association, not endorsement. They predict likely mentions, not ā€œbestā€ choices.
  • Marketers should demand transparent methodologies from AI tracking vendors.

Head to SparkToro for a closer look at the numbers.

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