We track what three AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Mode — say when buyers ask for software recommendations. Each week we run the same 182 buyer-intent prompts across 10 software categories and publish the result on a public leaderboard.
This week's run surprised me: in 5 of 10 categories, the three engines name a different brand as the leader. If you only watch one engine, you're seeing one vote in a three-way split.
Where the engines disagree
| Category | ChatGPT's leader | Gemini's leader | AI Mode's leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand monitoring | Brandwatch | Brand24 | Meltwater |
| Keyword research | Ahrefs | Semrush | Semrush |
| Proxy providers | Decodo | Oxylabs | Bright Data |
| Rank trackers | SE Ranking | SE Ranking | Semrush |
| Web scraping tools | Bright Data | Firecrawl | Bright Data |
In the other five categories they do agree — Semrush sweeps AI visibility platforms and SEO platforms, Surfer takes content optimization, SerpApi sweeps SERP APIs, and Google Analytics sweeps web analytics.
But "agree" is doing work here: even where the leader matches, the rest of the ranked list diverges. Gemini spreads mentions across more brands; AI Mode concentrates on fewer.
Why it matters
Every "best X tools" listicle an AI engine cites was written for Google. The engines read overlapping but different corpora, weight them differently, and come back with different winners. For a brand that means your AI visibility isn't one number — it's per engine, per category, per country. The full data, per-category tables and methodology are in the write-up and the methodology page.
Reproduce it
The pipeline is boring on purpose: prompt set → one API call per engine per prompt → count mentions. We run it on AnswerLine (I work on it) — one endpoint per engine, answers come back as JSON with the cited source URLs, which is also how we tell a real citation from a passing mention. 500 free credits covers a small category sweep.
Next run is Monday; if the disagreement number moves I'll post it here.
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