Eleven of the World's Leading Brands — and What the AI Engines Now Repeat About Them

Edited on Jun 23, 2026

R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Aretha Franklin's 1967 signature song is still the cornerstone for the CMOs who actually serve consumers — not the ones who just market at them.

UserTesting once studied the eleven brands that consistently appeared on multiple premier customer-experience indexes — like the NPS B2C Leaders Report and Forrester's CX Index. The list: Apple, Starbucks, Google, Coca-Cola, Lexus, USAA, Target, Nike, Zappos, Costco, and Edward Jones.

Five distinctions separated those eleven from everyone else: their treatment of employees, their in-person experiences, their seamless touchpoints, their CX execution, and their ability to connect emotionally.

Each of those five is now also an input into something the original study didn't have to think about: how the engines describe a brand to the next buyer who asks.

Employees

When excellent customer experience and an engaged workforce come together, real connections form. The Temkin Group's research showed employees at strong-CX companies are engaged with customers roughly 150% more than at weaker companies. USAA sends new hires to a literal boot camp — pre-packaged meals, drill sergeants — so they understand the audience they're serving. That is a discipline most brands won't pay for. Which is why most brands don't get the result.

In-person experiences

Despite the surge of online shopping, in-store still matters — and the shift toward digital that the pandemic accelerated hasn't fully replaced the touchy-feely experience the best retailers are built on. Apple's stores. Costco's warehouse floor. Lexus's dealer experience. The store is the brand's most defensible touchpoint because it's the one Amazon can't copy.

Seamless touchpoints

Creating seamless omnichannel experiences is the hardest hurdle for most brands — and the one Apple, Lexus, and Target lean on most. The customer journey is now researched on the engines, started in a browser, completed in an app, and serviced through a chatbot or call center. The brands that win are the ones where each handoff is invisible. The brands that lose are the ones where you have to repeat your account number three times.

Great CX

USAA, Edward Jones, and Lexus consistently get cited for personalization. A PwC survey found 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience — and 49% have made impulse purchases after a personalized one. Personalization isn't a margin tax. It's a margin generator.

Connecting emotionally

Emotion drives long-term brand loyalty. Roughly 60% of consumers use emotional language to describe their relationship with a favorite brand (Deloitte Digital). Harvard Business School's Gerald Zaltman attributed 95% of purchasing decisions to emotion. The brand that connects emotionally gets remembered. The brand that doesn't gets compared on price.

The new layer the original study didn't anticipate

All five of those CX disciplines now feed into a sixth one: the brand's footprint inside the synthesis layer.

When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews "what's the best brand for X" — for credit cards, cars, athletic shoes, financial advice, or club retail — the engine pulls from years of published coverage, reviews, customer commentary, and third-party benchmarks. The brands that dominate the eleven-name list above also dominate the engines' answers in their categories. Citation Share follows CX. CX follows the five disciplines.

That means the work of building a great brand and the work of getting cited inside the engines are converging into the same work. The disciplines that win at CX are the same disciplines that win at retrieval inside the engines.

Rand Fishkin once said: "The best way to sell something — don't sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, and trust of those who might buy." The eleven brands above earned it. The engines now repeat it. Forever.