We checked over 2,000 AI answers for 14 businesses. Four times out of five, the business wasn't named.

Ben Miller — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:01:13 +0000

We asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews the questions real buyers ask, for 14 different businesses, through October 2026. Across 2,172 answers, the business being asked about was named 22% of the time. In 72% of answers, the AI named other companies and left it out.

Full disclosure: I'm Ben, and I built Referenced, a tool that tracks how brands show up in AI answers. These figures come from the scans it ran. The businesses we track are anonymised, so no one is named here.

How often each engine named the businesses

Engine	Answers	Named the business	Named others instead	Brands per answer
ChatGPT	724	28%	68%	5.1
Perplexity	724	20%	74%	5.4
Google AI Overviews	724	18%	73%	4.4
All three	2,172	22%	72%	5.0

What surprised me was how crowded the answers were. The average answer named five brands, and more than half of ChatGPT's and Perplexity's named five or more. Even with that many spots on the list, the businesses we tracked usually didn't get one.

The engines rarely agree

When all three engines answered the same question on the same day, they all named the business only 10% of the time. On 64% of questions, none of them did. When a business did show up, nearly half the time it was on one engine only, so seeing your name in ChatGPT doesn't mean you're mentioned by Perplexity or Google.

Some businesses do far better than others

The best-placed business was named in 73% of its answers. The next best managed 37%, and two of the 14 weren't named in a single answer.

Your own website is a small slice of what AI reads

The models cite plenty of sources: about 11 links per answer from ChatGPT, 10 from Perplexity and 7 from AI Overviews. Only 1.5% to 3% of those links pointed at the website of the business being asked about. ChatGPT and Perplexity linked to that site in 17% of answers, AI Overviews in just 8%.

Most of the links went to other companies' websites. AI Overviews also leaned on forums and user posts far more than the other two (16% of its links, against 2 to 3% for ChatGPT and Perplexity). And Facebook turned up among the sources for all 14 businesses.

What I'd do with this

Start with the names that keep appearing where yours doesn't, and read the pages cited next to them. That's the closest you'll get to seeing what the models think the right answer is. Then spend your effort where they're actually reading: directory listings, social profiles, review sites and other people's articles.

How we measured this

The data covers 14 unrelated businesses, mostly small and mid-sized firms in retail, professional services, software and travel, with our own site excluded. Each business had its own set of 15 questions, written the way its buyers would ask them. We dropped any question that already contained the business's name, leaving 203 questions across the 14.

Every business's questions went to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews in scans run between 1 and 31 October 2026. The engines searched the web for all but 3 of the 2,172 answers, and none of the answers failed. An answer counts as naming the business when its name or a known alias appears in the text.

Some businesses scanned more often than others, so every percentage is worked out for each business first and then averaged across the 14. A business that scanned daily counts exactly as much as one that scanned once.

Fourteen businesses is a small sample, and AI answers change from day to day, so treat any one business's result as a snapshot.