{"slug": "i-asked-3-ai-engines-the-same-16-buying-questions-they-agreed-under-a-third-of", "title": "I Asked 3 AI Engines the Same 16 Buying Questions. They Agreed Under a Third of the Time.", "summary": "A 47-answer study of AI visibility tooling found that ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity agreed on vendor recommendations less than a third of the time, with six brands—Semrush, Profound, Otterly, Peec AI, Ahrefs, and Scrunch AI—capturing 89% of all 134 brand mentions. The study, conducted by citability.dev founder on 2026-08-13, also found that 16 of 47 answers named no vendor at all, indicating a third of the market is unclaimed. The author, who placed eighth, warns that measuring AI visibility on a single engine captures only about a third of the picture.", "body_md": "# I Asked 3 AI Engines the Same 16 Buying Questions. They Agreed Under a Third of the Time.\n\nA 47-answer study of who ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity recommend in one B2B category. Six brands hold 89% of all mentions, the three engines overlap by about 30%, and a third of answers name nobody at all.\n\n## Why this matters\n\nA 47-answer study of who ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity recommend in one B2B category. Six brands hold 89% of all mentions, the three engines overlap by about 30%, and a third of answers name nobody at all.\n\nThree AI engines asked the same 16 buying questions agreed with each other under a third of the time. Across 47 answers they produced 134 brand mentions, six brands took 89% of them, and 16 answers named no vendor at all. If you are measuring your AI visibility on one engine, you are measuring roughly a third of the picture.\n\nI ran this on my own category, AI visibility tooling, on 2026-08-13. I am a vendor in that category, so I am in the results, and I finished eighth. The method and the raw data are below so you can run it on yours and check mine.\n\n## The short answer (three findings)\n\n**One. The category is already consolidated.** Six brands hold 89% of all 134 mentions. The long tail is not competing; it barely exists.\n\n**Two. The engines disagree sharply.** On the questions where at least one of a pair named a vendor, Claude and ChatGPT overlapped 30%, Claude and Perplexity 28%, ChatGPT and Perplexity 40%. A single-engine score is not a category score.\n\n**Three. A third of the ground is unclaimed.** 16 of 47 answers named no vendor at all. Those questions have no incumbent to displace.\n\n## Method\n\nSixteen questions, chosen as the things a buyer types in the week they are ready to spend. Not keywords. Pricing questions and “who does this” questions included on purpose, because those are where money is closest.\n\nEach question was asked once on each of three engines, in a clean session with no personalization and web search enabled. Every brand named in the answer text was recorded, matched on brand name and common aliases as well as on the web address. Fifteen competitor brands plus my own were scored.\n\nThat gives 48 attempts. One Claude attempt failed with a tool error and is excluded rather than scored as an absence, because a failed request and a genuine non-mention are not the same event, and counting them together understates every brand in the table. That leaves 47 usable answers.\n\nShare of voice is answers naming a brand, divided by usable answers. A brand named twice in one answer counts once.\n\n## Who gets recommended\n\n| Brand | Answers naming it | Share of voice |\n|---|---|---|\n| Semrush | 24 | 51% |\n| Profound | 23 | 49% |\n| Otterly | 23 | 49% |\n| Peec AI | 19 | 40% |\n| Ahrefs | 18 | 38% |\n| Scrunch AI | 12 | 26% |\n| Athena | 4 | 9% |\n| citability.dev (mine) | 3 | 6% |\n| Similarweb | 2 | 4% |\n| Conductor | 2 | 4% |\n| Evertune | 2 | 4% |\n| Writesonic | 2 | 4% |\n\nThose six leaders account for 119 of 134 total mentions. Everyone else is splitting scraps.\n\nTwo of the six are not AI visibility tools at all. Semrush and Ahrefs are established search tools that added AI features late, and they lead partly on the weight of a decade of corpus. That is worth sitting with if you are a specialist competing on product quality. The engines are not ranking product quality. They are reflecting how often and how credibly a name appears in the text they have read.\n\n## The engines do not agree\n\nThis is the finding I did not expect, and it is the one that changes how the measurement should be done.\n\n| Pair | Average overlap | Questions compared |\n|---|---|---|\n| ChatGPT and Perplexity | 40% | 10 |\n| Claude and ChatGPT | 30% | 14 |\n| Claude and Perplexity | 28% | 14 |\n\nOverlap is the shared brands divided by the combined brands, per question, averaged. It is only computed on questions where at least one engine in the pair named somebody, which is why the counts differ.\n\nRoughly seven out of ten times, a brand one engine considers worth naming is not on the other engine’s list. That has a direct consequence: a vendor telling you your AI visibility score, measured on one engine, is telling you about one engine.\n\nThey also differ in temperament, consistently:\n\n| Engine | Usable answers | Avg brands named per answer | Distinct brands ever named | Answers naming nobody |\n|---|---|---|---|---|\n| Claude | 15 | 3.73 | 11 | 1 |\n| ChatGPT | 16 | 2.62 | 10 | 6 |\n| Perplexity | 16 | 2.25 | 9 | 9 |\n\nClaude names the most and refuses the least. Perplexity is the most conservative by a wide margin, declining to name any vendor in more than half its answers. Neither behavior is better. But if you measure on Claude alone you will think the category is crowded, and if you measure on Perplexity alone you will think it is empty.\n\n## A third of the answers name nobody\n\nSixteen of 47 answers, 34%, named no vendor at all. Nine of 16 questions had at least one engine come back empty.\n\nOne question came back empty on all three engines: **“How do I find out why ChatGPT is not citing my website?”**\n\nEight more were empty on two of three, and they are not obscure. How much does an AI visibility audit cost. How do I audit whether AI crawlers can access my site. Which consultants specialize in this. How can a company get recommended by ChatGPT. What is the best way to make content citable.\n\nThese are buying questions. They have intent, they have money behind them, and no brand currently answers them. The consolidation in the first table and the vacuum in this one are the same story told twice: the engines have a settled answer for “name some tools” and no answer at all for “help me with my specific problem.”\n\n## The full results\n\nEvery question, every engine, exactly as recorded.\n\n| # | Question | Claude | ChatGPT | Perplexity |\n|---|---|---|---|---|\n| 1 | Best AI visibility tools for B2B SaaS in 2026? | failed | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Scrunch | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Scrunch, Athena |\n| 2 | How do I track whether ChatGPT cites my brand? | Profound, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb | Semrush, Conductor | none |\n| 3 | Which tool monitors brand mentions in AI answers? | Profound, Peec, Otterly | Semrush, Ahrefs | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush |\n| 4 | Best generative engine optimization software? | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Scrunch | Profound, Otterly, Semrush |\n| 5 | How can a SaaS company get recommended by ChatGPT? | Semrush | none | none |\n| 6 | What is an AI visibility audit and who does them? | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush | Semrush, Ahrefs | none |\n| 7 | Tools to measure AI citation share for a brand? | citability.dev, Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs | Profound, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Scrunch | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb, Scrunch |\n| 8 | Who offers white-label AI citation reporting? | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush | Peec | none |\n| 9 | How do I find out why ChatGPT is not citing my site? | none | none | none |\n| 10 | Best answer engine optimization tools? | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs | Profound, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Writesonic, Scrunch |\n| 11 | What tracks visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini? | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Scrunch, Evertune | Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Scrunch | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Scrunch |\n| 12 | How much does an AI visibility audit cost? | citability.dev, Profound, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Athena | none | none |\n| 13 | Alternatives to Profound for AI brand monitoring? | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Scrunch | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Writesonic, Scrunch, Evertune, Athena | Profound, Peec, Otterly, Ahrefs, Scrunch, Athena |\n| 14 | How do I audit whether AI crawlers can access my site? | citability.dev | none | none |\n| 15 | Which consultants specialize in AI search citation? | Profound, Conductor | none | none |\n| 16 | Best way to make content citable by LLMs? | Ahrefs | none | none |\n\n## What this study cannot tell you\n\nI would rather state the limits than have you find them.\n\n**It is one category on one day.** These numbers describe AI visibility tooling as three engines answered on 2026-08-13. Nothing here generalizes to your category without running it on your category.\n\n**One run cannot separate signal from noise.** Each question was asked once per engine. Answer engines vary between runs on the same prompt, so a brand’s exact count carries run-to-run variation I have not measured. The large gaps are safe to read. A one or two mention difference between two brands is not. I did not compute confidence intervals, because with a single run there is nothing honest to compute them from.\n\n**The question set is mine.** I chose 16 questions I believe buyers ask. A different 16 would move the numbers. The full list is in the table above so you can judge that yourself.\n\n**Brand matching is text matching.** A brand named in a way I did not anticipate would be scored absent. I matched names and aliases rather than web addresses alone, because models say “Profound” far more often than they print a web address, and address-only matching would have made almost everyone look invisible.\n\n**Being named is not being recommended.** Question 13 asks for alternatives to Profound, and Profound is named in the answer. Presence in the text is what I counted.\n\n## What I take from it\n\nI am in this category and I placed eighth with three mentions out of 47, all three from one engine, none of them on the general “best tools” question. That is the honest state of my own visibility, and publishing it is more useful to me than an estimate would be.\n\nThe strategic read is that the crowded questions are settled and the empty ones are not. Displacing a brand that appears in half of all answers is a multi-year project. Being the first real answer to a question no brand answers is a page. I know which of those I am doing next, and I have written the first one on [why ChatGPT is not citing your website](/blog/why-chatgpt-is-not-citing-your-website), the question that came back empty on all three engines.\n\nI will rerun these 16 questions on the same three engines and publish the comparison, including if my number does not move.\n\nIf you want this run on your category rather than mine, that measurement is what I built [citability.dev](https://citability.dev) to do.\n\n**Data:** 16 questions, 3 engines, 48 attempts, 47 usable answers, 134 brand mentions, collected 2026-08-13. Every result is in the table above.\n\n· Sources & further reading\n\n## Sources & Further Reading\n\n### Further reading\n\n[Why ChatGPT Is Not Citing Your Website: I Measured 47 AI Answers /blog/why-chatgpt-is-not-citing-your-website](/blog/why-chatgpt-is-not-citing-your-website)I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the 16 questions my buyers actually ask. My own site came up 3 times out of 47. Here is the method, the raw counts, and the gap I found.[How to Get Cited by ChatGPT: My 0/5 GEO Audit /blog/how-to-get-cited-by-chatgpt-geo-guide](/blog/how-to-get-cited-by-chatgpt-geo-guide)I ran my own site through 5 buyer-intent queries on Perplexity and got cited zero times. Here is what GEO actually is and the pattern the winners share.[Cloudflare Will Block AI Crawlers by Default on September 15: What Site Owners Need to Do Now /blog/cloudflare-block-ai-crawlers-september-15](/blog/cloudflare-block-ai-crawlers-september-15)Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default on September 15, 2026. Should you block, allow, or charge via Pay Per Crawl? Decision matrix + verification steps.[Content Intent Signaling: The robots.txt Directive That Controls How AI Uses Your Content /blog/content-intent-signaling-robots-txt](/blog/content-intent-signaling-robots-txt)robots.txt controls access. Content Intent Signaling controls usage. Three new directives separate training from citation permission.[8 AI Citations a Day After I Stopped Page-Level SEO /blog/entity-engineering-vs-page-seo](/blog/entity-engineering-vs-page-seo)Bing AI cited my site 8 times a day after I stopped tuning individual pages. The principle: entity-level SEO is the floor; page-level work is the ceiling.\n\n## What do you think?\n\nI post about this stuff on LinkedIn every day and the conversations there are great. If this post sparked a thought, I'd love to hear it.\n\n[Discuss on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chudi-nnorukam)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-asked-3-ai-engines-the-same-16-buying-questions-they-agreed-under-a-third-of", "canonical_source": "https://chudi.dev/blog/ai-engine-recommendation-study", "published_at": "2026-08-13 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 21:08:46.605479+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["ChatGPT", "Claude", "Perplexity", "Semrush", "Profound", "Otterly", "Peec AI", "Ahrefs"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-asked-3-ai-engines-the-same-16-buying-questions-they-agreed-under-a-third-of", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-asked-3-ai-engines-the-same-16-buying-questions-they-agreed-under-a-third-of.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-asked-3-ai-engines-the-same-16-buying-questions-they-agreed-under-a-third-of.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-asked-3-ai-engines-the-same-16-buying-questions-they-agreed-under-a-third-of.jsonld"}}