We asked 25 questions a small business or SaaS team might ask before buying an AI visibility tool, from "How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?" to "Is there a free way to check my AI visibility?". Each question went once to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude through their official APIs with web search switched on, and once to Google AI Overviews from a live results page, through Cite42 on 2026-10-21. We recorded every source each assistant cited: 617 citations in all. The full question list is at the end of this page.
The numbers for ChatGPT
ChatGPT answered all 25 questions and cited 47 sources, 1.9 per answer. On 7 questions it cited nothing:
- Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my company when people ask for recommendations?
- How many prompts should I track to measure AI visibility?
- How do I find out what questions customers ask ChatGPT about my product category?
- How do I fix wrong information ChatGPT gives about my business?
- What is AI visibility and how is it measured?
- What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO?
- How do I get my SaaS mentioned when people ask ChatGPT for the best tools in my category?
Of the 47 citations, 43 pointed at documentation owned by OpenAI, Google or Perplexity. Every link carried a utm_source=openai parameter, the tag OpenAI adds so analytics can attribute the click.
| Domain | Citations | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| help.openai.com | 14 | 10 |
| support.google.com | 8 | 2 |
| perplexity.ai | 7 | 3 |
| developers.google.com | 5 | 3 |
| openai.com | 3 | 3 |
| developers.openai.com | 3 | 2 |
| ahrefs.com | 2 | 2 |
| assets.ctfassets.net | 1 | 1 |
| blogs.bing.com | 1 | 1 |
| hub-prod.perplexity.ai | 1 | 1 |
| llmstxt.org | 1 | 1 |
| semrush.com | 1 | 1 |
What stands out
ChatGPT cites the platform before it cites a commentator. Asked how to show up in Google AI Overviews, it cited Google's own developer documentation. Asked what llms.txt is, it cited llmstxt.org. Asked how Perplexity chooses sources, it cited Perplexity's help centre four times and nobody else. An independent page was cited only where no official document answered the question: Ahrefs on LLM visibility, the Semrush and Ahrefs free checkers for the free-tools question, a Bing blog post on its AI Performance report for the schema question, and a Trustpilot study for the review-sites question.
It also cites little. 1.9 sources per answer, against ten for Perplexity, means a ChatGPT answer usually rests on one or two pages, and for a quarter of our questions on none at all.
For local questions the same day the pattern flipped. Asked for an accountant in Manchester, a dentist in Austin and a plumber in Leeds, ChatGPT named businesses and cited Clutch, Healthgrades, Zocdoc and Checkatrade, quoting their ratings and review counts. There is no official document for "best dentist in Austin", so the directory becomes the authority.
What this means for a small site
For how-to questions in your category, you are competing with the platform's own documentation, and you will lose that contest on ChatGPT unless your page says something the documentation does not: a measurement, a dated test, a worked example. For buyer questions, the page ChatGPT cites is the directory or review site it already trusts, so your listing there is the page to maintain. Either way, a ChatGPT citation is rarer than a Perplexity or Claude one, and the five-assistant comparison shows how much rarer.
Limits
This is one run, on one day, on one topic. Asking the same questions a week later would give a different list of sources, which is why the methodology page treats single checks as snapshots. The assistants were queried through their APIs with search enabled, not through the consumer apps, so citation cards in the apps can differ. The questions are about AI visibility, so the cited domains lean towards marketing and SEO sites; a question about dentists would cite different ones. Gemini and AI Overviews return many citations as redirect links that hide the destination, so their domain tables cover only the links we could read.
Every question
| Question | Answered | Sources cited |
|---|---|---|
| How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT? | yes | 4 |
| Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my company when people ask for recommendations? | yes | 0 |
| Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses, and how does it pick them? | yes | 2 |
| Which search engine does ChatGPT use for web results? | yes | 1 |
| How do I get my website cited by Perplexity? | yes | 3 |
| How do I show up in Google AI Overviews for questions about my product? | yes | 3 |
| What is Google AI Mode and how do I get my site into it? | yes | 3 |
| Should I block GPTBot and other AI crawlers in robots.txt? | yes | 2 |
| What is llms.txt and does ChatGPT or Google actually use it? | yes | 3 |
| How can I track traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity in Google Analytics? | yes | 5 |
| How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my brand? | yes | 2 |
| How many prompts should I track to measure AI visibility? | yes | 0 |
| How do I find out what questions customers ask ChatGPT about my product category? | yes | 0 |
| How do I fix wrong information ChatGPT gives about my business? | yes | 0 |
| Does schema markup help a website get cited by AI assistants? | yes | 3 |
| What kind of pages do AI assistants cite most: comparison pages, FAQs, or blog posts? | yes | 1 |
| How do I write a comparison page that ChatGPT will cite? | yes | 1 |
| How do I get my product listed in ChatGPT shopping results? | yes | 4 |
| Do AI assistants use G2, Capterra or Trustpilot reviews when recommending software? | yes | 2 |
| How long does it take for a new page to show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers? | yes | 2 |
| What is AI visibility and how is it measured? | yes | 0 |
| What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO? | yes | 0 |
| How does Perplexity choose which sources to cite? | yes | 4 |
| How do I get my SaaS mentioned when people ask ChatGPT for the best tools in my category? | yes | 0 |
| Is there a free way to check my AI visibility? | yes | 2 |
