EY

Small Firms Beat Corporates in AI Search Visibility

Swiss provider Geoquality.ai analysed 300 Swiss domains across 12 industries using its Seakt scoring system and concluded that visibility inside AI answer systems (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity) does not depend solely on company size or ad budget. Seakt scores sites 0–100 on structured data, entity clarity, authority, content quality and technical accessibility and found smaller firms sometimes score higher than well-known corporations. Examples include the fintech Aktionariat (90) versus Julius Bär (36) and EFG (33), and trustee Findea (80) versus KPMG (64), Deloitte (51) and EY (48). Geoquality.ai reports seven domains deliberately block AI crawlers (including luxury and premium brands) and about 43 large brands are effectively invisible to AI systems due to generic bot-protection (Cloudflare, Akamai). Seakt was published as a working paper in May 2026 by founder Marco Biner; full rankings are available on Geoquality.ai.

US Dominates Top 100 Companies Ranking with AI

A study by EY published July 3, 2026, finds the AI boom has driven major gains for technology firms: the market capitalization of the world's largest tech companies rose 30% year-to-date to $35.2 trillion, while the total market value of the top 100 companies increased 18% to $61.9 trillion. Nvidia remains the most valuable company ($4.846 trillion), followed by Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. IPO newcomer SpaceX entered the ranking at sixth with a $2.25 trillion valuation. TSMC is the highest-ranked non‑US company, and only one German firm — Siemens (rank 72, $247.5 billion) — remains in the top 100; SAP fell to rank 114. The report highlights a widening lead for US tech players and structural challenges for European tech scaling.

Microsoft creates $2.5B AI implementation unit

Microsoft announced the formation of a new subsidiary, Microsoft Frontier Co., and said it will invest $2.5 billion and embed about 6,000 employees with customers to support AI implementations. The unit will include forward-deployed engineers, technical consultants, support staff and salespeople; Rodrigo Kede Lima, formerly leading Microsoft’s Asia business, will serve as president. Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, described the effort as a response to varied customer readiness and questions about model choice and integration. The move follows similar initiatives from Amazon, Anthropic and OpenAI and builds on Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investments in data centers and AI services. Microsoft reported roughly $2.1 billion in enterprise and partner services revenue in the March quarter.