We asked six AI platforms the same 100 everyday UK buying questions, across 10 industries, and compared the brands they recommended. They rarely line up, so a single AI strategy leaves you strong on some platforms and absent on others. The work is per platform, not one-size-fits-all.
"How do we show up in AI search?" usually means one platform, checked once. We ran 100 neutral, brand-free UK buying questions ("best family SUV", "best ski holiday company", "best dog food for a sensitive stomach") through six AI platforms at once, in grounded mode, then looked at the brands each one recommended and the sources behind them.
The simplest way to see it: only 5.3% of the brands recommended were named by all six platforms. The average recommended brand appears on just 2.26 of the six, and 46.1% are named by only one platform, with the other five not mentioning that brand for that question at all. So a brand's AI visibility is not a single figure to track. It is six different readings, one per platform, and they rarely line up. One strategy cannot cover all six.
Of the 1,198 brand recommendations the six platforms made between them, 46.1% came from exactly one platform, and only 5.3% were named by all six. Measure your visibility on one platform and you are not seeing a smaller version of the full picture, you are seeing a different one.
Visibility has to be read platform by platform. The useful question is not "are we in AI" but "which of the six platforms name us, and where are the gaps?"
Across all 15 pairs of platforms, mean brand overlap was 31.9%. Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode are the most aligned (43.7%), which is expected: they share an index. Everywhere else agreement is low, and the two flagship chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, are the furthest apart (22.2%).
You are not optimising for one ranking, you are optimising for six. The platform your customer opens may show a completely different shortlist from the one your team checked.
Agreement is not uniform. B2B SaaS is the most settled category we tested (51.9%), where the same names recur across platforms. Consumer Tech is the most contested (21.9%), where each platform champions a different set. The more fragmented your category, the more a single-platform check misleads.
In a fragmented category, being named by one platform is the start, not the finish. The whiteboard question is "which platforms name us, and where are the gaps?"
The six platforms do not just disagree on who to recommend, they behave differently doing it. ChatGPT names a tight shortlist on the thinnest evidence. Google AI Mode shows the fewest brands but buries each answer in citations. Claude names the most brands of any platform.
| Platform | Avg brands named | Citations per answer |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 4.6 | 4.0 |
| Claude | 6.2 | 7.0 |
| Gemini | 5.0 | 10.8 |
| Perplexity | 4.8 | 7.5 |
| Google AI Overviews | 3.3 | 11.2 |
| Google AI Mode | 3.5 | 21.8 |
The playbook differs by platform, which is the whole point: one approach will not serve all six. Winning on ChatGPT is about being one of a few confident picks; winning on the Google surfaces is about being in the dense web of sources they cite.
Behind the answers sit 6,119 citations across 2,423 domains. The ten most-cited account for just 21.9%, and 81% of domains appear only once or twice. By type, most citations are editorial, review and brand sites, but video (almost all YouTube) is the single biggest individual source at 7.0% of all citations, with community and forums adding another 3.7%. Google-owned properties account for 12.6%.
| Source type | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial, review and brand sites | 5,068 | 82.8% |
| Video | 430 | 7.0% |
| Google and search | 298 | 4.9% |
| Community and forums | 228 | 3.7% |
| Retail and app stores | 77 | 1.3% |
| Reference and official | 18 | 0.3% |
| Most-cited source | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| youtube.com | 430 | 7.0% |
| google.com | 298 | 4.9% |
| reddit.com | 209 | 3.4% |
| which.co.uk | 110 | 1.8% |
| forbes.com | 58 | 0.9% |
| moneysavingexpert.com | 57 | 0.9% |
| tomsguide.com | 51 | 0.8% |
| aol.com | 43 | 0.7% |
| techradar.com | 43 | 0.7% |
| play.google.com | 41 | 0.7% |
Earning AI visibility is breadth, not one placement: video, community, reviews and dozens of mid-sized sources. The work is unglamorous and hard to fake, which is what makes it defensible once you have it.