Semrush names four brands whose repositioning has not caught up with what ChatGPT tells buyers, including Hotjar four years after Contentsquare bought it

A prospect who asks ChatGPT which heatmap tool to try still gets Hotjar as a standalone product, four years after Contentsquare bought it and more than a year after the two brands officially merged. Semrush's Dana Nicole calls this the LLM positioning lag, and her piece on the Semrush blog on Monday, September 29 walks through four named brands whose current positioning has not reached the answer engines. The point of the piece is a working problem for GEO teams, and every example carries the screenshot behind it.

The lag, in four names

Hotjar. Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021 and the two officially merged by July 2025. Nicole's screenshot of ChatGPT shows Hotjar listed second in a table of heatmap tools with no mention of Contentsquare, and no link out to the redirect that now points hotjar.com at Contentsquare. A buyer walks away thinking Hotjar is still its own product.

Blue Apron. Blue Apron was subscription only for more than a decade, then added a pay-as-you-go option in August 2025 and announced it on Good Morning America. Nicole's ChatGPT screenshot from September 2026 still calls it a "flexible subscription" service, more than a year after the change.

Duolingo. Duolingo added math in 2022, music in 2023, and chess in 2025. The ChatGPT summary Nicole captured only references language learning, so a parent looking for a math app never learns Duolingo is an option.

Peep Laja. Laja built his following as a conversion rate optimisation expert through CXL, then left CRO around 2016 to focus on B2B strategy at Wynter. ChatGPT still lists him as a primary CRO resource and does not surface Wynter as his current company.

Why the lag exists

Nicole names three causes. New positioning is absent from the model's training data. Old and new descriptions of the same brand disagree across the open web. Years of the old positioning outweigh a few months of the new one, so the model leans on the version it has seen most often. Semrush cites Capgemini for a market number underneath the argument: the share of consumers who replaced search engines with generative AI for product and service recommendations went from 25 percent in 2023 to 58 percent in 2025. That figure is Capgemini's; the four examples above are Semrush's own screenshots.

What the piece says to do

Nicole's checklist is prosaic and useful: announce changes through press so external outlets carry the new positioning, refresh old pages on your own site rather than leaving the old copy in place, keep messaging consistent across every property including footers and product pages, update business listings and directory entries, structure the new positioning so an extraction pipeline can pick it up cleanly, and monitor how AI engines describe you every quarter.

For a marketing or brand team, the useful reframing here is a timeline one. A new positioning reaches an answer engine the quarter enough new pages, third-party citations and press mentions outweigh the archive. Every quarter before that, a prospect asking an AI gets the old description read back with full confidence, and the sale can be lost inside that answer.

Source

Primary: The LLM Positioning Lag: What It Is and How to Avoid It by Dana Nicole on the Semrush blog, September 29, 2026. Market figure: Capgemini research on consumer use of generative AI for recommendations, cited by Semrush.