Three judges. Same defendant. Completely different case files.
That’s what happened when Seer Interactive tested which websites ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode actually cite when answering the same types of questions. The overlap? Just 11% of domains appeared in more than one platform. The other 89% were visible in one courtroom and invisible in the others.
It gets stranger. Perplexity’s most-cited source is Reddit — 46.7% of its references pull from community threads. ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia at 47.9%. Google AI Mode? YouTube, at 23.3%. Three AI search engines, three fundamentally different definitions of what makes a source worth trusting.
For a decade, the rule was simple: rank on Google, and you’re visible. That rule just shattered into three pieces.
The monoculture is over
Here’s what the old world looked like. You hired an SEO person (or agency). They got your pages ranking on Google. When someone searched for your type of service, your site appeared. Maybe position three, maybe position eight — but you were in the game. One platform, one set of rules, one optimisation playbook.
That’s the world most businesses still think they’re operating in.
But the data tells a different story. According to Semrush’s analysis of 80 million clickstream records, ChatGPT’s share of general searches tripled from 4.1% to 12.5% in just six months during 2025. Perplexity grew from 230 million to 780 million monthly queries in roughly the same period. Google’s own users now type queries three to seven times longer than they did two years ago — and those longer queries trigger AI-generated summaries that answer the question without sending anyone to your website.
You’ve probably noticed this yourself. You ask ChatGPT a question, get an answer with a few source links, and move on. Your customers are doing the same thing — except the sources ChatGPT is citing might not include you
Three ecosystems, three sets of rules
The divergence isn’t subtle. Each AI platform has developed its own personality — its own bias about who deserves to be quoted.
Perplexity trusts the crowd. Nearly half its citations come from Reddit. It prizes community-validated answers — real people describing real experiences. Its users reflect this: they spend an average of 13 pages per session and 9 minutes on referred sites, longer than Google referrals. These are researchers who want the human signal underneath the AI summary.
If your business has no presence in community discussions — no Reddit threads, no forum mentions, no authentic user-generated conversation happening around your brand — Perplexity doesn’t know you exist.
ChatGPT trusts the institution. Wikipedia dominates its citation pool. It gravitates toward encyclopaedic, authoritative, well-structured content. The kind of writing that defines a concept clearly and backs it with references. ChatGPT’s users spend 8–10 minutes per session in multi-turn conversations, asking follow-up after follow-up. They want depth.
If your website reads like a brochure — all sales copy, no substance — ChatGPT has nothing to cite.
Google AI Mode trusts Google. YouTube is its top source at 23.3%, followed by its own established index of older, high-authority domains. Its engagement pattern is the opposite of the other two: rapid summaries with almost no click-through. According to Datos and SparkToro’s Q4 2025 State of Search report, 93% of Google AI Mode sessions end without a single external click.
If you’re not producing video content or maintaining a long-established domain, Google’s AI defaults to someone who is.
| Perplexity | ChatGPT | Google AI Mode | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top Source | Reddit (46.7%) | Wikipedia (47.9%) | YouTube (23.3%) |
| Citation Style | Numbered, panel-based | Narrative, footnoted | Visual, snippet-based |
| User Behaviour | 13 pages/session, deep research | 8–10 min multi-turn conversations | Rapid summary, 93% zero-click |
| Rewards Brands That… | Have community discussion & social proof | Publish authoritative, well-structured content | Produce video & maintain established domains |
"But I'm not a publisher — why should I care about citations?"
This is the part where it’s tempting to tune out. Citations, AI summaries, source preferences — this sounds like a problem for media companies and content marketers. You run a business. You buy ads. Your leads come from Google Ads and Meta, not from ChatGPT mentioning you in a paragraph.
Fair enough. Let me show you what this looks like in practice.
We work with a car dealership in Auckland called Sunday Drive. They sell vehicles on consignment — you bring them your car, they handle the photography, video, marketing, and sale. Twelve months ago, I searched “give me the best car dealership selling on consignment in Auckland” across every major AI chatbot. Sunday Drive appeared in none of them.
Today, they’re the number one result in both Google Gemini and ChatGPT. Gemini calls them “widely considered the gold standard for consignment in Auckland” and specifically praises their marketing as “industry-leading.” ChatGPT recommends them first, highlighting their “professional marketing and consignment services.” They also appear in Claude, at number three.
Here’s what makes this interesting: Sunday Drive made zero SEO technical improvements during that twelve-month period. No schema markup changes. No keyword optimisation. No “GEO strategy.”
What changed was everything else. We built an integrated multichannel campaign spanning YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook — paid and organic — along with consistent social media posting that showcased their inventory and expertise. The AI visibility wasn’t the goal. It was the byproduct of doing multichannel properly.
Think about that for a second. Gemini cited their YouTube presence. ChatGPT picked up on their authoritative brand positioning. The signals each platform was looking for — video content for Google’s ecosystem, brand authority for ChatGPT’s — were all being generated by a single, coordinated campaign. Not three separate optimisation efforts. One strategy, producing signals that happened to satisfy all three judges simultaneously.
Now think about what would have happened if Sunday Drive had hired a separate “AI search optimisation” consultant on top of their existing agencies. More money. More coordination overhead. More finger-pointing. And probably worse results — because AI platforms don’t reward technical tricks. They reward brands that look genuinely authoritative across the entire web.
The fragmentation tax you're already paying
If this pattern sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same problem you’re already living with — just one layer deeper.
Right now, your Google Ads specialist doesn’t coordinate with your Meta person. Your email team doesn’t know what your landing pages say. Your SEO consultant has never spoken to your paid media buyer. Each one is optimising their own channel, claiming their own wins, and nobody sees the full picture.
Now multiply that blindness by the AI search layer. Your SEO person is optimising for Google’s traditional rankings — which predict only 12% of AI citations. Nobody is thinking about whether your content is structured for ChatGPT’s preference for well-sourced, authoritative answers. Nobody is monitoring whether your brand appears in the discussions that Perplexity leans on. Nobody is creating the video content that Google AI Mode prioritises.
The Sunday Drive result didn’t come from adding another specialist to the pile. It came from removing the pile entirely.
The silver lining hiding in the data
There’s a counterintuitive bright spot buried in all of this disruption.
AI-referred traffic — while still tiny at roughly 1% of total publisher visits — converts at dramatically different rates. Visitors arriving via ChatGPT convert at 14.2%, versus 2.8% for Google organic. That makes each AI-referred visitor roughly five times more valuable than a traditional search visitor.
The volume is smaller, but the intent is sharper. Someone who asked an AI a 23-word question about their specific situation and got pointed to your business isn’t casually browsing. They’ve already been pre-qualified by the conversation they just had. They arrive with context, with intent, and with a problem that matches what you solve.
Brands cited within Google’s AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks than those left out. And AI referral traffic is growing 165 times faster than traditional organic. The businesses that figure out multi-platform AI visibility aren’t just protecting against loss — they’re accessing a higher-quality pipeline than Google ever delivered.
What you can do this week
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. But you can start seeing the gaps.
Search for your core service queries — the way a customer would describe their problem, not the way you’d keyword-stuff a page — in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. Note where you appear, where you don’t, and who shows up instead. Most businesses have never done this. The results are usually sobering.
Check whether your brand has any presence in community discussions. Reddit, forums, review sites, industry threads. Perplexity weights these heavily, and they’re often the source your competitors are getting cited from while you’re not.
Look at your content through the lens of each platform’s bias. Is your website structured to be quoted — with clear, direct answers to common questions in the first 40–60 words of each key page? Is your YouTube channel active? Is the brand story consistent across social, web, and video — or does each channel tell a slightly different story because a different agency built it?
If the answers feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is data.
Three judges, one advocate
Those three judges are still sitting in their courtrooms, still reading from different case files, still applying different standards of evidence. That’s not going to change. If anything, the ecosystems will continue to diverge as each platform doubles down on what makes it distinct.
But the defendant — your brand — doesn’t need three separate legal teams who never coordinate. Sunday Drive didn’t need an AI search specialist, a YouTube agency, a social media manager, and an SEO consultant all billing separately and never talking. They needed one advocate who understood that the signals each judge was looking for could all be produced by a single, coherent strategy.
The platforms don’t agree on who’s trustworthy. That’s the new reality. The opportunity belongs to whoever stops treating each one as a separate problem — and starts building the kind of brand authority that satisfies all three at once.
Not sure where your brand shows up — and where it’s invisible?
We’ll run your business through all three AI platforms and show you exactly where you appear, where you don’t, and what’s costing you leads you never knew existed. That’s what our free Agency Waste Audit uncovers.