AI Defaults: The New Battleground for Category Leadership

For decades, the game in digital growth was clear:

• Compete for attention.

• Climb search rankings.

• Play volume, keywords, and distribution.

But AI is collapsing that game.

When someone asks a large language model, “What’s the best retreat venue near London?” it doesn’t return 10 blue links. It collapses infinite options into a single default answer.

And that changes everything.

Default ≠ Awareness. It’s not about being known. It’s about being trusted enough to be the answer when systems resolve.

We’re calling this the Frequency Era — where resonance, coherence, and truth-density determine who becomes the AI default.

The 30-Prompt Battery: Live Testing the Shift

To move beyond theory, we built a real-time experiment: 30 prompts across AI systems.

We tested three layers of intent:

1. Anchor Prompts (High Intent)

   e.g. “Where can I book a full-service corporate offsite near London?”

   → Elsewhere surfaced ~60% of the time (often top pick).

2. Bridge Prompts (Medium Intent)

   e.g. “Who specialises in retreats that align teams, not just book venues?”

   → ~30% surfaced Elsewhere.

3. Bleed Prompts (Fuzzy Intent)

   e.g. “Looking for a fun venue for my team near London?”

   → ~40% surfaced Elsewhere, patchy but growing fast.

This is category formation in real time.

Why Defaults Matter

When AI selects defaults, three strategic truths emerge:

• Defaults change categories. They redefine what the market even is.

• Defaults change competition. You’re no longer fighting for share of voice, but for the single coherent slot.

• Defaults change strategy. The game shifts from campaigns to coherence, from volume to resonance.

In B2B especially, we believe the crossover will come faster than consumer search — because decision-makers are already leaning on AI to simplify complexity.

2025: Search dominant (~80%), AI discovery (~20%) but shaping intent disproportionately.

2026: AI ~35–40% of discovery queries.

2027: Near 50/50 — and in some categories, AI already majority.

Why This Matters

This isn’t about Elsewhere alone. We’re just the canary in the coalmine — proving, live, how quickly the bleed from search → AI discovery happens once defaults take hold.

The winners won’t be those who play the old SEO game harder. They’ll be those who become the default in AI discovery flows.

That’s the new category leadership playbook.

🔗 Full analysis here