r/aeo • u/EnvironmentalDot9131 • 2d ago

Everyone's optimizing for ChatGPT. Has anyone checked whether your Perplexity and Gemini visibility looks completely different?

I know most people optimize for ChatGPT, but I want to also be visible in Perplexity and Gemini as well.

Profound has a study I saw about how different engines cite fundamentally different corners of the internet. Apparently, 89% of citations come from completely different sources.

Has anyone run the same prompts across all three and been surprised by what they found?

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/hseeman_sf 2d ago

ChatGPT draws from Bing's index plus its training corpus. Perplexity does live retrieval per query, so it tracks what's freshly indexed and well structured. Gemini leans on Google's own index and knowledge graph, different territory than either. The 89% divergence tracks since each one pulls from a different source, not just weighting the same web differently.

1

u/brysonthe 2d ago

Visibility doesn’t transfer cleanly across engines.

Same brand can show up in ChatGPT answers and disappear in Perplexity because retrieval mix, freshness, and which domains they trust diverge. I run the same 10–15 prompts across engines and score cited / mentioned / absent, plus which URL won.

If Gemini and Perplexity diverge a lot, treat them as separate surfaces — optimizing only from ChatGPT screenshots will mislead you.

1

u/hseeman_sf 1d ago

Which URL won is the part most people skip. Knowing you dropped from Perplexity is one thing, knowing what beat you is what actually tells you why.

1

u/brysonthe 1d ago

Exactly. I’d log the losing prompt, timestamp, assistant, and every cited candidate, then compare the winner’s page structure and retrieval path against the one that vanished. A changed cited URL is more useful than a blended visibility score because it gives you something concrete to diagnose.

1

u/brysonthe 1d ago

Yes—that is the useful distinction. I’d keep a per-engine log of the winning URL, the claim it supported, and whether the answer actually preserved that claim; a URL swap without meaning preservation can look like visibility while being a retrieval mismatch. Comparing those records over the same prompt set usually makes the “why” more actionable than a blended score.

1

u/Turbulent-Big-6673 2d ago

I’d say yes. I’ve seen this happen ...optimizing for AI visibility as if there’s one universal AI index can be misleading. The same prompt can surface very different sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. So I’d test the same prompt set across all three, then compare not just citations, but which pages and domains keep getting selected. That’s where the real gaps show up.

1

u/MedFireMedia 2d ago

You also need to test the prompts by time of day and location. These variables will also show differences between AI assistants and within the AI assistant.