Small experiment, and I want to be honest about the scope before anyone asks, just try one query ("What is the best email marketing platform?"), run 7 times each on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. Tiny sample, not big experiment. But two things stuck out enough that I figured they were worth posting. 1) The same brand shows up completely differently depending on the model. I used Mailchimp as the anchor. Here's how often each model mentioned it: ChatGPT: 100% Claude: 100% Perplexity: 86% Gemini: 43% Same query, same week. So if you only ever check ChatGPT and pat yourself on the back for being "visible in AI," Gemini might be quietly ignoring you more than half the time. 2) This was bigger surprise. AI doesn't really cite the brands. It cites lot of the review sites. When I looked at which sources the models were actually pulling from, the most cited domains weren't the email tools at all. They were third party review and comparison sites: mailtrap.io showed up 33 times techradar.com 20 times brevo.com 18 times ventureharbour.com 15 times emailvendorselection.com 13 times (and reddit.com popped up 11 times, which made me laugh) So the takeaway I walked away with. If you want AI to recommend your product, polishing your own website is only half the game. Getting mentioned on the review and comparison sites these models already trust seems to matter more. Feels a lot closer to digital PR than to classic SEO. One query, small sample, one moment in time. And these answers drift week to week anyway, which is a whole other rabbit hole I'm still figuring out. But the gap between models and the "review sites beat brand sites" thing were consistent enough across the runs that they didn't feel like noise. Anyone else poking at AI visibility seeing the same pattern? Especially curious whether other people are getting that Gemini gap too. Also if you have some good ideafor experiment, let´s do it ;) (I collected this with a tool I'm build called CiteTide. Happy to share the full methodology if anyone wants it.)   submitted by   /u/JBZ_one [link]   [comments]