A potential customer types "best hair salon in Gràcia" into ChatGPT. Another types exactly the same thing into Perplexity. A third asks Gemini. If you've ever wondered how to appear on Perplexity, start here: the three answers name different businesses. Not partly different: different.

This isn't a bug. It's how they work. And it's the reason showing up on Perplexity tells you absolutely nothing about whether you show up on ChatGPT.

If you've ever tested your business in one assistant, seen yourself there and relaxed, this article is going to make you a little uncomfortable.

They don't agree even when they get it right

The most solid data available today comes from Ahrefs, which analysed 15,000 questions to see how many of the pages cited by AI were also in Google's top ten.

The average is 12%. But the breakdown by engine is the interesting part:

ChatGPT: 8%
Perplexity: 29%
Google's AI Overviews: 38%

Perplexity leans on search results almost four times as much as ChatGPT. They're not the same system with a different face: they're different ways of deciding what to trust.

And compared with each other, they don't match either. Out of 680 million citations analysed in early 2026, only 11% of the domains cited by ChatGPT were also cited by Perplexity.

An honest caveat here: the studies on this overlap don't agree. Depending on the methodology, the range runs from 11% to around 59%. Anyone showing you a single figure as if it were settled truth is simplifying. What no measurement disputes is the direction: each engine drinks from a different well.

Translated to your business: your website can be a trusted source for one system and invisible to the next. Not because one is right and the other wrong, but because they look in different places and decide in different ways.

Why they're so different

Each assistant is, inside, a different machine. One leans heavily on an existing search index. Another builds its own crawl and prioritises sources it can quote word for word. Another draws on directories and editorial content before business websites. And all of them change the way they decide every few weeks, without telling anyone.

That means there's no "one place" to be. There's a presence spread out, and each assistant looks at a different part of it. It's the same idea as why your business is invisible to AI even if you show up on Google, multiplied by three.

Google contradicts itself too

The most uncomfortable part is that you don't even need to switch assistants.

Within Google itself, the AI Overview and the good old local results map aren't fed the same way: the overlap with the top 10 in AI Overviews is 38%, the highest of all — but that still means three out of every five sources Google cites in its own AI aren't among its top ten results.

Put another way: you can see your pin at the top of the map, feel reassured, and not exist in the paragraph the AI writes just above it. The same Google. Two different systems.

The three practical consequences

One check isn't a diagnosis. Showing up in one assistant, on one day, with one particular wording of the question, doesn't tell you how you're doing. It tells you how you were doing at that moment, in that system, for that phrase. Change "best" to "recommended", or the neighbourhood to the district, and the answer changes.

There's no single lever. Because each engine weighs different things, there's no magic setting that gets you into all three at once. What wins in one can be irrelevant in another. So be wary of anyone selling you a trick: we've already written about the impossible promises of AI marketing.

Your competitors aren't all in the same place. The one beating you on ChatGPT may not be the one beating you on Gemini. They're different competition maps, and most businesses don't know there's more than one.

What does work in all three at once

Here's the useful part, and it's more boring than you'd like: what helps in every engine is information that's readable and verifiable.

It's not a trick per engine. It's a common base:

There's something of yours to read. A website at an address you control. Instagram and booking apps don't count: they're not yours and they're poor sources.
It can be cut down to one sentence. "Cut and colour from €45, no appointment needed until 12" gets quoted. "Quality and commitment" doesn't get quoted anywhere.
It says the same thing everywhere. Name, address and phone number identical — character by character — on Google, on your website and in your trade association's directory. Three different versions are three weak businesses instead of one strong one.
The doors are open. Look at your robots.txt. If it blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, there's nothing else to discuss until you fix that.
There's recent movement. New reviews, answered, and up-to-date opening hours. A frozen business reads as a closed business.

That raises the floor in all three. What you can't control is which of them decides to name you.

Doing it yourself: the sum

Free, one afternoon. The five points above, except the first. Do them even if you never hire anyone.

A long weekend. Point 1, if you don't have a website: template, domain, hosting, certificate, compressed photos, legal pages.

And the part that never ends. Checking the three engines, with the same questions, every few weeks. Because they move on their own. This is the part nobody keeps up: it isn't hard, it's just that it never ends and nothing reminds you.

What we do

The common base and the monitoring.

Your wiweb page is born meeting all five points: it lives at an address that's yours, services and questions go in quotable blocks, your Google profile is shown live inside the page — so it can't contradict it — the robots.txt lets the assistants in on purpose, and your reviews update themselves.

And we look at them separately, which is the only thing that makes sense when they share so few sources. Grow (€9/month): every month, ChatGPT and Perplexity. Pro (€24/month): every week, plus Gemini and Google's AI results — all four, with up to eight competitors tracked. Always the same set of questions, so that comparing one month with another means something.

Creating and publishing your page is free, no card needed: start here. The detail of what we check is in SEO and AI, the plans are on pricing, and the source of every number in this article is on sources.

FAQ

If I show up on ChatGPT, do I show up on the others?

No. Out of 680 million citations, ChatGPT and Perplexity shared only 11% of the cited domains. Being in one is a good sign, but it says nothing about the other two.

Is it worth worrying about Perplexity if it's the smallest?

It's the assistant that shows its sources most visibly, so when it names you, people can click through and reach you. That's real traffic, not just a mention. And it leans on search results far more than ChatGPT (29% against 8%), so classic SEO work pays off sooner there.

Can I check it myself by asking about my business?

You can get an idea, but carefully: if you ask about your own name, the AI will almost always say something nice. What matters is what it answers when someone who doesn't know you asks about a service and a neighbourhood.

Does this replace traditional SEO?

No, it adds to it. And as you've seen, even doing well on the Google map doesn't guarantee you a place in Google's own AI Overview.

How to appear on Perplexity, ChatGPT and Gemini: why they don't recommend you the same way