- The median brand citation rate is 11% on ChatGPT, 9% on Perplexity, and 4% on Google AI Overviews.
- Single-engine tracking is flawed: the same brand's citation rate diverges by up to 24 percentage points across different engines.
- Most brands sit in single digits on at least one major AI engine.
- This data is drawn from 2,443 prompt-runs across 7 real brands in June 2026.
Visiby ran 172 real buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews in June 2026 and logged every source. The three engines cited 1,174 different domains. On 11% of prompts answered by all three, they shared no source at all. Tracking one engine tells you almost nothing about the rest.
Most claims about "AI visibility" are anecdotes. This is a log. In June 2026, Visiby's pipeline ran 172 real buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, then recorded every URL each engine cited — 3,340 citation events across 2,355 URLs from 1,174 domains. ChatGPT answered all 172 prompts, Perplexity all 172, Google AI Overviews 170. A structural validator checked all 9,615 underlying citation claims before anything was aggregated. The numbers below are named and public, so you can re-run a prompt yourself and check them.
01 — OverlapDo the three engines cite the same sources?
They do not. Across 172 prompts, ChatGPT cited 409 unique domains, Google AI Overviews 504, and Perplexity 573 — 1,174 distinct domains in total, with only partial overlap. Perplexity's source universe is roughly 40% larger than ChatGPT's. So a brand cited by one engine is frequently absent from the other two, and a dashboard that watches a single engine is reporting on a slice of the conversation.
The clearest way to see this is to follow one source across the three engines:
| Domain | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| 45% (78/172) | 0% (0/172) | 29% (50/172) | |
| YouTube | 0.6% (1/172) | 66% (114/172) | 54% (92/172) |
| SEMrush | 7% (12/172) | 24% (42/172) | 16% (27/172) |
| tryprofound.com | 5% (9/172) | 24% (42/172) | 6% (10/172) |
Reddit is in nearly half of ChatGPT's answers and absent from every Perplexity answer. YouTube runs the opposite way: two-thirds of Perplexity answers, almost nothing on ChatGPT. These are the same 172 questions hitting wildly different source preferences. If your AEO plan assumes one engine's behaviour applies to all three, it is built on a false map.
02 — DisagreementHow little do the engines overlap on the same question?
The headline finding is the disagreement on individual questions. On 146 prompts where all three engines returned cited sources, only 12% saw all three pairs of engines share a domain. The rest split: 77% had partial overlap, and 11% had zero shared source — three answers to one question, built on three entirely separate domain sets.
That 11% is the number that should worry anyone tracking a single engine. On roughly one in nine fully-answered prompts, the engines agreed on nothing. Winning ChatGPT's answer for a query tells you nothing about who owns that query on Perplexity.
This holds at the brand level too. Take the most-cited AI-visibility tool in our prompt set, tryprofound.com. Inside the AI Visibility Tracking topic specifically, Perplexity cited it in 24 of 45 prompts (53%); ChatGPT cited it in 5 (11%). The same brand, the same 45 questions, cited 4.7 times more often on one engine than the other. Engine divergence is not a rounding error. It is the dominant pattern.
03 — AuthorityDoes domain authority decide who gets cited?
A counterintuitive result. We scored the 25 most-cited domains on CITE-40, Visiby's 40-point domain-authority rubric. YouTube scored 34/40 and Reddit 27/40 — and tryprofound.com scored 10/40, one of the lowest in the set. Yet tryprofound.com appeared in 47 of the 172 prompts (27%), built on 17 URLs and 55 citation events.
So a domain near the bottom of the authority rubric out-cited most of the field. AI engines reward topical relevance and content structure, not raw authority on its own. A focused page that answers the exact question, with a specific sourced fact an engine can safely reproduce, beats a higher-authority site that only answers it sideways. That is good news if you are not yet the biggest name in your category.
04 — MethodologyHow we built it
The method is plain, because the point is that you can check it.
- Mine real buyer prompts. Of the 172 prompts, 127 were harvested live from People Also Ask boxes, forums, and AI Overviews; the rest were written to fill gaps in awareness, consideration, and evaluation. These are full questions phrased the way a buyer types them, not keyword stubs. Three from the set: "What is a good AI citation rate for my category?", "Why is my competitor cited more often than me in AI answers?", and "How do I become a cited source in Perplexity answers?" — the third you can paste into Perplexity right now and watch which domains it returns.
- Run every prompt through all three engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, in June 2026, US locale. ChatGPT and Perplexity answered all 172; Google AI Overviews answered 170.
- Extract and match every cited URL. Pull each source URL from the answer, resolve it to a domain, and count it once per prompt per engine. That produced 3,340 citation events across 2,355 URLs from 1,174 domains.
- Validate before aggregating. A structural validator checked all 9,615 underlying citation claims; none failed. Per-engine citation rate = prompts where the domain was cited, divided by prompts the engine answered.
Every figure on this page traces to that June 2026 run. The domains are named and the prompts are public, so any single number is one query away from being checked.
05 — Action PlanWhat the data says to do
- Track all three engines, always. With 1,174 domains and near-zero overlap on a tenth of questions, a single-engine read is wrong for most of them.
- Match content format to the engine you are losing. Perplexity leans on YouTube (66% of answers) and Reddit barely appears; ChatGPT leans on Reddit (45%) and almost never on YouTube. Fix the format your weak engine actually cites.
- Win the exact question before chasing authority. A 10/40 domain reached 27% citation share by answering the precise prompt. Specificity beats size.
What lifts a page once you know its weak engine is not a secret. A 2023 Princeton study (Aggarwal et al., arXiv:2311.09735) tested optimisation tactics across 10,000 queries and found that adding statistics, citations, and direct quotations were among the strongest moves for getting a source pulled into an AI answer, lifting visibility by up to 40%. Google's own generative-AI optimization guidance (updated May 2026) says the same in plainer terms: content people find genuinely useful influences your presence in AI answers more than any markup trick, and AI Overviews still grounds on core Search ranking. Our log agrees: the pages that earn citations are the ones that hand an engine a specific, sourced fact it can reproduce without guessing.
A note on the baseline. When we ran this same pipeline against our own brand, Visiby was cited in 0 of the 172 prompts on all three engines, with a brand-entity score of 8 out of 100 against Profound's 52. That zero is a first-run baseline for a young brand, not a market rate — and it is exactly why we built the benchmark. You cannot close a gap you have never measured.
06 — ConclusionConclusion
I ran these 172 prompts expecting the engines to mostly agree. They did not. ChatGPT trusts Reddit and ignores YouTube; Perplexity does the reverse; on one prompt in nine they cite nothing in common. The practical takeaway is short: pick a real set of buyer questions, run them through all three engines, log who gets cited, and work on the engine where you are weakest — because the one you are not watching is running on a different map.
07 — FAQFrequently asked questions
Want this for your brand
This benchmark is the baseline. Visiby measures your brand the same way: it runs your category's real buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, shows which domains got cited instead of you and on which engine, and turns each gap into a weekly action plan. See where you stand: visiby.net.
Related guides
- What Is GEO — how to get cited inside AI answers.
- What Is AEO — answer engine optimization, explained.
- AI Visibility Tools — how to measure citation share across engines.
Arun Pandit is the founder of Visiby, an AI-visibility tracker by FNA Technology that measures how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews cite a brand. He writes about generative engine optimization from the data Visiby collects across the brands it tracks. View full profile →