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 Gemini
Gemini answered all 25 questions and cited 202 sources, 8.1 per answer. 179 of those, 89%, were redirect links on vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com that do not show the destination page. Only 23 citations could be read, and they came from 20 domains.
| Domain | Citations | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| semrush.com | 3 | 3 |
| ahrefs.com | 2 | 2 |
| alhena.ai | 1 | 1 |
| amicited.com | 1 | 1 |
| clickforest.com | 1 | 1 |
| closeit.co | 1 | 1 |
| corymaki.com | 1 | 1 |
| developers.openai.com | 1 | 1 |
| growtika.com | 1 | 1 |
| impactplus.com | 1 | 1 |
| latevaweb.com | 1 | 1 |
| llmagnet.com | 1 | 1 |
What stands out
The redirects are the finding. Gemini's API returns its grounding sources as redirect links, and a developer request on Google's AI forum from October 2025 asks for a field with the original URL because "no field provides the complete original URL". Nothing has changed since. A tool that reports a per-domain share of Gemini citations has either resolved every redirect by fetching it or is guessing, and either way the number deserves a method note.
Of the links we could read, Semrush and Ahrefs were cited more than once and everything else exactly once, including pages on impactplus.com, clickforest.com, stackmatix.com, zapier.com and a Search Engine Journal article. Those overlap with what Perplexity and Claude cited for the same questions, which suggests Gemini is reading similar pages even where its citations hide it.
The brand names were visible even when the links were not. For the local questions the same day, Gemini named accountants, dentists and plumbers in its answers and described them, while every one of its citations was a redirect.
What this means for a small site
Gemini can cite you without anyone being able to see it in a citation table. Measure Gemini by whether the answer names you and how it describes you, and treat citation counts for it as a lower bound. If you need the destination domains, resolve the redirects, and say so. The five-assistant comparison reports Gemini's readable citations separately for that reason.
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 | 6 |
| Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my company when people ask for recommendations? | yes | 7 |
| Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses, and how does it pick them? | yes | 7 |
| Which search engine does ChatGPT use for web results? | yes | 4 |
| 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 | 8 |
| What is Google AI Mode and how do I get my site into it? | yes | 8 |
| Should I block GPTBot and other AI crawlers in robots.txt? | yes | 10 |
| What is llms.txt and does ChatGPT or Google actually use it? | yes | 7 |
| How can I track traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity in Google Analytics? | yes | 8 |
| How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my brand? | yes | 6 |
| How many prompts should I track to measure AI visibility? | yes | 7 |
| How do I find out what questions customers ask ChatGPT about my product category? | yes | 9 |
| How do I fix wrong information ChatGPT gives about my business? | yes | 8 |
| Does schema markup help a website get cited by AI assistants? | yes | 10 |
| What kind of pages do AI assistants cite most: comparison pages, FAQs, or blog posts? | yes | 5 |
| How do I write a comparison page that ChatGPT will cite? | yes | 8 |
| How do I get my product listed in ChatGPT shopping results? | yes | 12 |
| Do AI assistants use G2, Capterra or Trustpilot reviews when recommending software? | yes | 8 |
| How long does it take for a new page to show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers? | yes | 12 |
| What is AI visibility and how is it measured? | yes | 7 |
| What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO? | yes | 9 |
| How does Perplexity choose which sources to cite? | yes | 12 |
| How do I get my SaaS mentioned when people ask ChatGPT for the best tools in my category? | yes | 6 |
| Is there a free way to check my AI visibility? | yes | 9 |
