The day after Gemini 4 Hydrogen became the default model in Google's AI Mode, we asked it about brands 52,923 times and ranked the brands it recalls, overall and in 74 industries.
TL;DR. Google made Gemini 4 Hydrogen the default model in AI Mode on 12 November 2026, and it answers the hardest questions in AI Overviews. The next day we asked it about brands 52,923 times, using 110.9 million tokens, and extracted the brand network it holds in its parametric memory: 239,266 brands and 4.4 million links between them. Each brand now has an authority score across all brands and inside each of 74 industries. Apple, Microsoft and Google lead overall. Coca-Cola leads Beverages. In Passenger Airlines, Delta scores 97 to American Airlines' 100. Windows ranks #11, and the model never named it when asked for brands. The data is at dejan.ai/authority.
How is my brand represented in the new model? #
Google calls Hydrogen the biggest model upgrade to Search yet. It is the default in AI Mode for all users, it handles the hardest questions in AI Overviews, and it is rolling out in the Gemini app. A brand owner now has three questions about it:
- How am I represented in this model?
- Does it tie my brand to the things I do?
- How strong is that tie?
An AI answer draws on two sources: the pages the system retrieves, and what the model already holds from training. This study measures the second source. Every question went to Hydrogen with search switched off, so each answer shows which brands the model recalls and which brands it links together.
What the map shows #
The 382 brands with the most authority, placed by the links Hydrogen makes between them. The interactive version is at dejan.ai/authority.
Apple, Microsoft and Google hold the most authority
Authority is a score from 0 to 100. A brand scores high when many brands lead to it and those brands score high themselves, the same idea PageRank applies to web pages. Nine of the top ten are technology companies, and Nike is the tenth.
| Rank | Brand | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apple | 100.0 |
| 2 | Microsoft | 94.3 |
| 3 | 90.9 | |
| 4 | Samsung | 88.6 |
| 5 | Amazon | 86.7 |
| 6 | Sony | 85.2 |
| 7 | Meta | 84.0 |
| 8 | Intel | 82.9 |
| 9 | AMD | 81.9 |
| 10 | Nike | 81.0 |
| 11 | Windows | 80.2 |
| 12 | Alphabet | 79.5 |
| 13 | Nvidia | 78.9 |
| 14 | Dell | 78.3 |
| 15 | HP | 77.7 |
Every industry has its own ranking
We asked Hydrogen for the brands of each of the 74 GICS industries and scored each industry on its own links. A brand's place in its industry can differ from its place overall. Ford and Chevrolet lead Automobiles ahead of Toyota, and Walmart leads Broadline Retail ahead of Amazon.
| Industry | Top five brands |
|---|---|
| Beverages | Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite, Fanta, Mountain Dew |
| Automobiles | Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota, Honda, Nissan |
| Passenger Airlines | American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines |
| Software | Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, SAP |
| Banks | JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Goldman Sachs |
| Pharmaceuticals | Pfizer, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Merck |
| Broadline Retail | Walmart, Amazon, Target, Costco, Sam's Club |
| Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods | Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, Dior, Prada |
| Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure | Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott Bonvoy, InterContinental |
| Interactive Media & Services | Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp |
Some industries have a runaway leader, others a dead heat
The table shows the second brand's score when the leader's score is set to 100. In Software, Oracle holds about a third of Microsoft's authority. In Passenger Airlines, the top two are three points apart.
| Industry | Leader | Second | Second's score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paper & Forest Products | International Paper | WestRock | 33 |
| Software | Microsoft | Oracle | 35 |
| Household Products | Tide | Clorox | 37 |
| Diversified REITs | W. P. Carey | Realty Income | 40 |
| Industrial REITs | Prologis | Rexford Industrial Realty | 42 |
| Trading Companies & Distributors | Mitsubishi Corporation | Fastenal | 96 |
| Passenger Airlines | American Airlines | Delta Air Lines | 97 |
| Building Products | CertainTeed | Owens Corning | 97 |
| Multi-Utilities | Dominion Energy | Duke Energy | 97 |
| Diversified Consumer Services | H&R Block | Coursera | 99 |
Windows ranks #11, and the model never names it when asked for brands
We asked Hydrogen to name brands 8,511 times, with and without an industry. It never named Windows, Android, Office, Azure or Alexa. Each of them still ranks in the top 200, because the model names it near the top of the list when asked about its parent. Twelve brands in the top 300 reach the map this way.
| Brand | Overall rank | Enters through |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | 11 | Microsoft |
| Android | 30 | |
| Office | 67 | Microsoft |
| DeepMind | 81 | |
| Azure | 82 | Microsoft |
| Jordan Brand | 122 | Nike |
| Walkman | 139 | Sony |
| Surface | 153 | Microsoft |
| ThinkPad | 158 | Lenovo |
| Alexa | 166 | Amazon |
| Galaxy | 190 | Samsung |
| Bravia | 200 | Sony |
How Hydrogen fills a list of 100 brands #
Hydrogen thinks before it answers, and Google's API returns a written summary of that thinking. Thinking made up 79% of all tokens in this study. We saved the summary for 17,009 calls, all of them questions that named a brand and an industry.
The summaries follow one sequence. The model first states who the brand is. It then fills the 100 places in tiers, starting with owners and sister companies, then direct competitors, then regional players, then adjacent businesses. For Empire Merchants, a drinks distributor, the summary opens with the identification:
I know Empire Merchants is a significant player in the wine and spirits distribution landscape, particularly in New York.
Its first tier is "Direct Affiliates and Key Parent/Sister Companies" and its second is "Major National Wine & Spirits Competitors".
Keyword counts across the 17,009 summaries:
- 94% mention competitors or rivals.
- 76% mention owners, subsidiaries or acquisitions.
- 67% mention suppliers, customers or partners.
- 95% keep a running count towards 100.
- 28% mention a brand that was dropped or swapped.
Check your own brand #
The public data covers the top of the map. DEJAN App runs the same kind of probe for one brand and the topics you choose, on the latest Google, OpenAI and Anthropic models. Three views answer the three questions:
- How am I represented? Parametric Memory lists what each AI platform recalls about your brand from memory alone, with search switched off.
- Does it tie me to the things I do? Association Mapping asks in both directions: which topics the model names for your brand, and which brands it names for each of your topics.
- How strong is the tie? Competitor Gaps shows, for each topic you test, how often the probe answers name your brand against rival brands. Competitor Centrality shows how many of your topics each rival is named against.
IKEA ranks #149 overall in this study. Its public project in DEJAN App shows these views for a real brand: app.dejan.ai/property/3299?tab=associations (ARC > Association Mapping).
How we did it #
Every call went to gemini-4-hydrogen through Vertex AI, with thinking set to low and no search tools. We asked three kinds of question.
1. Name brands. 1,105 calls with no topic:
name 100 brands, one per line, say nothing else
2. Name brands for an industry. 7,406 calls, 100 for each of the 74 GICS industries:
name 100 brands that you associate with the following industry, one per line, say nothing else
industry: Beverages
3. Name the brands tied to a brand. 18,288 calls, one for each brand found in steps 1 and 2:
name 100 brands most closely associated with the following brand, ordered from most to least associated, one per line, say nothing else
brand: Coca-Cola Then 26,124 more calls, one for each brand inside each industry that named it:
name 100 brands most closely associated with the following brand in the following industry, ordered from most to least associated, one per line, say nothing else
brand: Coca-Cola industry: Beverages
Names were kept as the model wrote them and matched in lower case without spaces or punctuation.
Each answer in step 3 is a list of links from one brand to others, and a link counts for more the earlier it appears in the list. Authority comes from personalized PageRank over those links. The overall ranking restarts at the 420 brands from step 1, weighted by how often and how early the model names them. Each industry ranking adds that industry's links and restarts at the industry's brands from step 2. 187,070 of the 239,266 brands have an overall rank, and the rest appear only in the industry answers.
This is our second brand probe. The first ran on Gemini 3 Flash in March 2026, followed links two levels deep and reached 2.9 million brands: AI Brand Authority Index. This one adds the industry rankings and follows links one level deep so far.