GenAI Lens Use Case: Airlines in 2026

Over the past 6-12 months, the AEO/GEO space has really heated up. Many of our customers want to understand their visibility, sentiment, and prevalence in answers from ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, and other LLMs.

It comes down to two questions: Where do I stand today? And how do I improve?

Late last year, we launched GenAI Lens to help answer both. In the coming weeks, we’ll publish research to help companies and organizations better understand how LLMs generate results, what sources they cite, and how to improve their position.

Every day, we analyze hundreds of thousands of prompts and responses, and millions of citations - giving us a unique dataset and perspective.

To reduce bias, we use industry-level prompts that exclude company names (e.g., instead of asking about a specific airline policy, we ask which carriers are most flexible and see who shows up).

As a frequent flier, I was curious what the airline results looked like.

Here’s a quick snapshot from tens of thousands of LLM responses in January 2026:

US airlines lead visibility: North American carriers dominate overall presence in responses, with Delta leading (86.2), followed by American and United. (These prompts were run from the US, so results may differ elsewhere)

International carriers lead sentiment: Qatar Airways, Emirates, and Cathay Pacific top positive sentiment (around 60), often driven by mentions of premium comfort, luxury amenities, and service.

Third-party sources shape perception: NerdWallet is the most-cited authority (589 citations), ahead of traditional industry sources. Reddit is the most-cited social network, while Forbes and CNBC lead among news outlets.

Owned citations are relatively low: Delta, American, and United lead in citations to their own sites, but even the top performer (Delta) is only 2.4% of ~125,000 citations - room for improvement across the industry.

More research is coming soon.