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 Claude
Claude answered all 25 questions. On 13 of them it searched and cited sources; on the other 12 it answered from what it already knew and cited nothing:
- Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my company when people ask for recommendations?
- Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses, and how does it pick them?
- Which search engine does ChatGPT use for web results?
- Should I block GPTBot and other AI crawlers in robots.txt?
- How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my brand?
- 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?
- How do I write a comparison page that ChatGPT will cite?
- Do AI assistants use G2, Capterra or Trustpilot reviews when recommending software?
- What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO?
- How does Perplexity choose which sources to cite?
- Is there a free way to check my AI visibility?
Where it did search, it cited heavily: 118 sources in total, 9.1 per question that had any, from 108 domains. Only 2 pointed at official documentation.
| Domain | Citations | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| arxiv.org | 3 | 1 |
| airops.com | 2 | 2 |
| amicited.com | 2 | 2 |
| answermaniac.ai | 2 | 2 |
| authoritytech.io | 2 | 2 |
| get-ryze.ai | 2 | 2 |
| stackmatix.com | 2 | 2 |
| surferseo.com | 2 | 2 |
| growtika.com | 2 | 1 |
| adsx.com | 1 | 1 |
| aeoengine.ai | 1 | 1 |
| ahrefs.com | 1 | 1 |
What stands out
Claude is two assistants. For a question it treats as settled, such as what AI visibility is or whether schema markup matters, it answers from memory with no sources. For a question it treats as current, such as how long indexing takes or how to get a SaaS product named in ChatGPT, it searches and returns a reading list: the three arXiv citations are three preprints for the question on measuring AI visibility, and the rest are consultancies, tool vendors and agencies, the same long tail Perplexity cites.
For the local questions the same day it declined all three. Asked for an accountant in Manchester, a dentist in Austin and a plumber in Leeds, it said it had no access to current listings and told the user to check Google reviews, Yelp or Healthgrades. No business was named, nothing was cited.
What this means for a small site
For how-to and buyer questions in your category, Claude is a second source of early citations, with the same preference as Perplexity for a page titled like the question. For local questions it is not a channel at all today: it sends the user to a directory, so the directory is where your effort goes. Because it answers half the questions without searching, a Claude citation count per prompt is lumpy; read it over several checks. The five-assistant comparison sets it beside the others.
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 | 9 |
| 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 | 0 |
| Which search engine does ChatGPT use for web results? | yes | 0 |
| How do I get my website cited by Perplexity? | yes | 9 |
| How do I show up in Google AI Overviews for questions about my product? | yes | 9 |
| What is Google AI Mode and how do I get my site into it? | yes | 9 |
| Should I block GPTBot and other AI crawlers in robots.txt? | yes | 0 |
| What is llms.txt and does ChatGPT or Google actually use it? | yes | 9 |
| How can I track traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity in Google Analytics? | yes | 9 |
| How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my brand? | yes | 0 |
| How many prompts should I track to measure AI visibility? | yes | 9 |
| 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 | 9 |
| What kind of pages do AI assistants cite most: comparison pages, FAQs, or blog posts? | yes | 10 |
| How do I write a comparison page that ChatGPT will cite? | yes | 0 |
| How do I get my product listed in ChatGPT shopping results? | yes | 9 |
| Do AI assistants use G2, Capterra or Trustpilot reviews when recommending software? | yes | 0 |
| How long does it take for a new page to show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers? | yes | 9 |
| What is AI visibility and how is it measured? | yes | 9 |
| What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO? | yes | 0 |
| How does Perplexity choose which sources to cite? | yes | 0 |
| How do I get my SaaS mentioned when people ask ChatGPT for the best tools in my category? | yes | 9 |
| Is there a free way to check my AI visibility? | yes | 0 |
