
Research
Ali Khallad6 min read
When AI Describes Your Brand, It Cites Your Competitors
We analyzed almost 100,000 AI citations across five platforms. Of the outside sources AI cites about a brand, around 40 percent are its competitors.
4 articles

We analyzed almost 100,000 AI citations across five platforms. Of the outside sources AI cites about a brand, around 40 percent are its competitors.

An experiment across about 16,400 AI answers and 127,198 source citations from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. The five engines agree on just 2.7% of sources, and Gemini cites three times more than ChatGPT.

Google Search is moving from links to answers, agents, and generated interfaces. That changes what web visibility means.

I ran an nginx probe against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and Manus to see what each assistant actually sends when it fetches your page. Real user-agents, real Accept headers, real vendor blind spots.