The 10 Biggest Filers Hold Just 17.9% of Published AI Search Patent Families, and 1,507 Other Owners Share the Rest

Summary

Picture a software company owner who reads that AI search is controlled by two or three giants. The filing record tells a more spread-out story. Big platforms lead, but most of the patent activity comes from a long tail of other companies and universities.

We counted owners on 2,268 patent families that describe both generative AI and search. The 10 largest filers hold 17.9% of them. Microsoft (107) and Google (92) lead, and 1,203 owners appear on just one family.

So the common idea that a handful of companies hold half of these patents does not match the data. A patent shows what was filed, not what is live in any product.

What we measured

We pulled every publication in Google Patents Public Data (patents-public-data.patents.publications) published from January 1, 2018 to September 17, 2026 that carries at least one CPC code in G06F16 (information retrieval), G06F40 (natural language processing) or G06N (AI and machine learning) and has an English abstract. That is 2,170,848 publications in 1,214,491 patent families. For each publication we kept the English title, the English abstract and up to the first 20,000 characters of the English claims. English claims exist for 488,406 publications, mostly US, European and international (WO) filings, so text matching is deeper for those offices than for Chinese, Korean or Japanese filings, which we matched on title and abstract.

From that set we kept the 2,269 families whose text describes both generative AI and search or retrieval (see our companion study on filings by year), then the 2,268 of them with at least one harmonized assignee name. We used the harmonized assignee names in the dataset, merged Google Inc into Google LLC and two IBM name forms, and counted each family once per assignee. Co-owned families count for each owner. Display names are shortened (for example, Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC is shown as Microsoft).

No single filer comes close to dominating

We ranked every assignee by the number of distinct families it holds.

Microsoft and Google together hold 199 families. Below them, counts fall quickly, and the 15th largest filer holds 15.

Most owners have filed only once

A long tail of owners files a single patent in this area.

Academic and research institute names appear on 364 families, more than the top two companies combined. Many are Chinese universities filing in China.

New names keep arriving

We flagged owners whose first AI search family published in 2025 or 2026 and who already hold at least five.

Enterprise software vendors and banks make up much of this group. That fits filings about searching company documents with language models, not only public web search.

What this means

For a business owner, the spread matters more than the leaderboard. AI answers are being built into business software and banking apps as well as search, so your information can surface in more places than a single search engine. That makes AI search optimization less about one platform and more about keeping your facts right wherever they live.

Keep facts about your business consistent everywhere they appear, from your site to directories and partner listings, because many different systems may read them. If you want to know where AI assistants already mention you, start with a free AI visibility audit from our AI SEO agency.

Limits

A patent shows what was filed, not what is live in any product.

Patents usually publish about 18 months after the first filing, so families first filed in 2025 and 2026 are heavily undercounted, and 2026 publication counts cover January 1 to September 17, 2026 only.

Assignee names come from the dataset's harmonized field. Subsidiaries and licensing entities may appear under separate names, and we merged only obvious duplicates.

A small number of families list individual people as owners. We do not name them.

Counts reflect filings that matched our keyword rules and published by September 17, 2026.

Frequently asked questions

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