One of our team spent a few weeks on a small experiment: take the questions a B2B buyer might actually type — "best agency for X," "is Y worth it," "who should I use for Z" — and run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews. More than forty prompts, each on all four engines.
We expected disagreement at the edges. We didn't expect this much. The same question often produced a different shortlist on every engine. One engine would confidently recommend a company another engine acted like it had never heard of. For some brands, one engine returned a tidy description and another returned nothing at all.
A few things we took away, all hedged because this clearly shifts over time:
- There isn't one "AI ranking" to chase. There are several, and they pull from different places — Perplexity leans on community and reference sources, Google leans on its own index, and so on.
- A strong website didn't predict whether a brand showed up. The brands that surfaced were the ones described clearly and consistently in the places these engines quote.
- When an engine didn't know a brand, it didn't say "I'm not sure." It either skipped it or filled the gap with something stale.
For a marketing team, the practical lesson isn't "optimize for ChatGPT." It's that a brand's story is now being retold by several engines with different sources, and the job is to make that story consistent enough that all of them get it roughly right.
About westOeast
westOeast is a B Corp certified, cross-border B2B marketing agency. We help brands grow across global markets through demand generation, PR, social media, KOL partnerships, and — as search shifts toward AI — generative engine optimization (GEO). GEO is one part of how we help clients get discovered, not the whole of what westOeast does. More on how we think about AI visibility: https://www.westoeast.com/en/services/geo/
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