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 Perplexity
Perplexity answered all 25 questions and cited 250 sources: 10.0 on every single question, which is how its search works rather than a coincidence. Those citations came from 187 different domains. Only 22 pointed at OpenAI, Google or Perplexity documentation; the rest were independent sites.
| Domain | Citations | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| spawned.com | 8 | 5 |
| semrush.com | 7 | 7 |
| searchengineland.com | 6 | 6 |
| help.openai.com | 6 | 1 |
| support.google.com | 5 | 3 |
| blog.google | 5 | 2 |
| maxaeo.ai | 4 | 4 |
| customerimpact.be | 3 | 3 |
| dev.to | 3 | 3 |
| madx.digital | 3 | 3 |
| searchable.com | 3 | 3 |
| authoritystack.ai | 3 | 2 |
What stands out
The list is long and flat. The most cited domain, spawned.com, got 8 citations across 5 questions, and it is a tool vendor's learn hub with pages titled the way people ask. Semrush and Search Engine Land follow, then a long tail: consultancies, agencies in Belgium and the UK, dev.to posts, personal blogs. Most domains were cited exactly once.
What those pages have in common is the title. For "How do I get my website cited by Perplexity?", Perplexity cited a page titled as a guide to optimising for Perplexity and another titled as how to get cited in Perplexity in 2026, along with eight more from small AI and SEO vendors. For "Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my company?", it cited six small blogs whose titles were versions of that question, and no other assistant cited any of them.
For the three local questions the same day, Perplexity again cited ten sources each: trade directories such as TrustATrader and Which? Trusted Traders, clinic listings on Zocdoc, and the businesses' own websites. The most cited hosts across the three were trustatrader.com, trustedtraders.which.co.uk, zocdoc.com, healthgrades.com.
What this means for a small site
Perplexity is where a new page earns its first citation. It reads live, it cites ten sources per answer, and it rewards a page whose title matches the question and whose first paragraph answers it. It is also the assistant most likely to cite your own website for a local question, alongside the directories. If you publish one answer page this month, check Perplexity first; the five-assistant comparison shows why the others take longer.
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 | 10 |
| Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my company when people ask for recommendations? | yes | 10 |
| Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses, and how does it pick them? | yes | 10 |
| Which search engine does ChatGPT use for web results? | yes | 10 |
| How do I get my website cited by Perplexity? | yes | 10 |
| How do I show up in Google AI Overviews for questions about my product? | yes | 10 |
| What is Google AI Mode and how do I get my site into it? | yes | 10 |
| 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 | 10 |
| How can I track traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity in Google Analytics? | yes | 10 |
| How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my brand? | yes | 10 |
| How many prompts should I track to measure AI visibility? | yes | 10 |
| How do I find out what questions customers ask ChatGPT about my product category? | yes | 10 |
| How do I fix wrong information ChatGPT gives about my business? | yes | 10 |
| 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 | 10 |
| How do I write a comparison page that ChatGPT will cite? | yes | 10 |
| How do I get my product listed in ChatGPT shopping results? | yes | 10 |
| Do AI assistants use G2, Capterra or Trustpilot reviews when recommending software? | yes | 10 |
| How long does it take for a new page to show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers? | yes | 10 |
| What is AI visibility and how is it measured? | yes | 10 |
| What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO? | yes | 10 |
| How does Perplexity choose which sources to cite? | yes | 10 |
| How do I get my SaaS mentioned when people ask ChatGPT for the best tools in my category? | yes | 10 |
| Is there a free way to check my AI visibility? | yes | 10 |
