Top 20 stock photo sites by AI search visibility (2026)

What we observed in this categoryauto-generated

Shutterstock dominates AI visibility in the stock photo category with a 62.5% visibility score — more than 5x the category average of 11.9% and 25 percentage points ahead of second-placed Adobe Stock at 37.5%. This gap is structurally significant: Shutterstock is named in AI Overviews at a rate that no other brand approaches, giving it disproportionate share of AI-generated recommendations. Adobe Stock's 26.2 composite score places it clearly in second, but the distance between first and second is larger than the distance between second and the rest of the field.

A sharp divergence exists between AI visibility and citation across the category. Of the top 10 brands, only Pexels (12.5% citation rate) and 123RF (12.5% citation rate) receive any citations at all — every other named brand, including Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStock, Unsplash, and Getty Images, holds a 0.0% citation rate. This means the AI surfaces these brands by name without linking to their domains, making them visible but not trusted as sourced evidence. Pexels is the only top-5 brand that achieves both naming and citation simultaneously.

Google AI Overviews is the sole top engine recorded for every brand in this dataset, indicating the category's AI visibility landscape is entirely Google-driven with no meaningful signal from alternative engines. The top cited sources in the category are overwhelmingly third-party — reddit.com, zapier.com, uschamber.com, and doubleshotcreative.com — rather than the stock photo platforms themselves. Pexels and blog.123rf.com are the only brand-owned domains appearing in the cited sources list, reinforcing that AI treats this category through editorial intermediaries rather than primary brand sources.