We asked 4 AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini — the questions buyers actually type, about 30 Cloud, hosting & infrastructure brands, on 2026-09-20. That is 360 answers. One name kept appearing that we never asked about: the engines volunteered Vultr against 14 of the 30 brands we measured.
Every figure below comes from those answers, and the query to re-run them is at the bottom of this page.
Which engine actually names brands?
Not equally. Claude named a brand in 64.4% of its answers; Perplexity managed 51.1%. That is a 13.3-point gap between two engines asked identical questions on the same day, which is the whole argument for measuring more than one.
{"type":"bar","title":"Share of answers naming a brand, by engine (Cloud, hosting & infrastructure)","unit":"%","data":[{"label":"Claude","value":64.4},{"label":"ChatGPT","value":62.2},{"label":"Gemini","value":60},{"label":"Perplexity","value":51.1}],"note":"360 answers measured 2026-09-20."}
Do the engines agree on who exists?
18 of the 30 brands were named by all 4 engines, and 3 were named by none of them (Astro, Grasshopper, Hugo). The rest sit in between, visible to some engines and invisible to others.
The widest split was Tresorit: ChatGPT named it in 100% of the answers we asked about it, Perplexity in 0%. That comparison rests on the handful of questions we asked about that one brand, not on the full sample — treat it as a lead to investigate, not a law.
{"type":"bar","title":"How many engines named each brand","data":[{"label":"4 of 4 engines","value":18,"emphasis":false},{"label":"3 of 4 engines","value":7,"emphasis":false},{"label":"2 of 4 engines","value":2,"emphasis":false},{"label":"0 of 4 engines","value":3,"emphasis":true}],"note":"Brands, out of 30 measured."}
Brand by brand, the disagreement is easier to see than to describe. These are the 15 brands the engines split hardest on — each cell is how often that engine named that brand.
{"type":"heatmap","title":"Which engine names which brand","unit":"%","cols":["ChatGPT","Claude","Gemini","Perplexity"],"rows":[{"label":"Heroku","cells":[100,66.7,33.3,0]},{"label":"Proton Drive","cells":[0,66.7,100,100]},{"label":"Tresorit","cells":[100,100,66.7,0]},{"label":"Gatsby","cells":[66.7,33.3,33.3,0]},{"label":"Linode","cells":[100,100,33.3,33.3]},{"label":"pCloud","cells":[66.7,0,66.7,66.7]},{"label":"Zoom Phone","cells":[33.3,100,100,100]},{"label":"Dialpad","cells":[33.3,66.7,66.7,66.7]},{"label":"IBM Cloud","cells":[66.7,66.7,33.3,33.3]},{"label":"Jekyll","cells":[66.7,33.3,33.3,33.3]},{"label":"8x8","cells":[0,33.3,33.3,33.3]},{"label":"Alibaba Cloud","cells":[33.3,0,33.3,0]},{"label":"Cloudflare","cells":[100,100,66.7,66.7]},{"label":"DigitalOcean","cells":[100,66.7,100,66.7]},{"label":"MEGA","cells":[0,33.3,33.3,0]}],"note":"The 15 brands with the widest spread between engines, out of 30 measured."}
Named is not the same as recommended
A mention is not an endorsement. Of every mention in this study, 34.6% was the engine's first recommendation, while 48.6% was the brand being offered as an alternative to something else. A brand can look visible and still only ever appear as the runner-up.
{"type":"bar","title":"What role the brand played when an engine named it","unit":"%","data":[{"label":"offered as an alternative","value":48.6,"emphasis":true},{"label":"recommended first","value":34.6,"emphasis":false},{"label":"listed in a comparison","value":15.4,"emphasis":false},{"label":"mentioned in passing","value":0.9,"emphasis":false},{"label":"negative example","value":0.5,"emphasis":false}],"note":"Share of all mentions in this study."}
9 brands were named but never recommended first by any engine: 8x8, Alibaba Cloud, Gatsby, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, MEGA, Oracle Cloud, Tresorit, Vonage. For those, visibility work is not the problem — positioning is.
What the engines actually said
Scores are a summary. These are the sentences themselves — one from each engine, about a different brand, exactly as written on 2026-09-20.
ChatGPT, on Alibaba Cloud: "Alibaba Cloud - Major player in Asia, expanding globally. Strong e-commerce and compliance solutions. Competitive pricing and performance."
Claude, on 8x8: "8x8 – Focuses on global enterprise communications spanning UCaaS and contact center in one vendor stack, with its single-vendor global voice network and built-in analytics appealing to multinational teams."
Gemini, on Amazon Web Services (AWS): "Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the global market leader, known for its comprehensive service catalog of over 200 products, including computing (EC2), storage (S3), databases (RDS), and serverless functions (Lambda)."
Perplexity, on AWS: "AWS for large-scale, enterprise-grade deployments."
The engines are not criticising you. They are omitting you.
Of the 214 mentions in this study, 181 were positive in tone and 2 were negative. That is 84.6% positive. Reputation management is not the problem here: when an engine has something to say about a brand it is almost always kind, and when it has nothing to say it simply leaves the brand out. The gap to close is absence, not sentiment.
Which sources are the engines reading?
The engines cited digitalocean.com more than any other source (74 citations, 2.3% of all citations in this study). But the long tail is the real story: the top 10 domains together account for only 15.2% of citations. There is no short list of sites to get listed on — the engines are reading widely.
{"type":"bar","title":"Most-cited sources across every answer","data":[{"label":"digitalocean.com","value":74},{"label":"techradar.com","value":71},{"label":"northflank.com","value":61},{"label":"pcmag.com","value":59},{"label":"cloudzero.com","value":47},{"label":"zapier.com","value":44},{"label":"dev.to","value":41},{"label":"medium.com","value":36},{"label":"hostingadvice.com","value":33},{"label":"forbes.com","value":31}],"note":"Citations counted across 360 answers. \"Engines\" column below shows how many of the 4 cited each source."}
| Source | Citations | Engines citing it |
|---|---|---|
| digitalocean.com | 74 | 3 of 4 |
| techradar.com | 71 | 4 of 4 |
| northflank.com | 61 | 3 of 4 |
| pcmag.com | 59 | 2 of 4 |
| cloudzero.com | 47 | 3 of 4 |
| zapier.com | 44 | 3 of 4 |
| dev.to | 41 | 3 of 4 |
| medium.com | 36 | 3 of 4 |
| hostingadvice.com | 33 | 3 of 4 |
| forbes.com | 31 | 3 of 4 |
Who do the engines bring up instead?
These names were never in our sample — the engines volunteered them while answering about someone else. Vultr came up against 14 of the 30 brands we measured. If you are in this category, these are the brands you are being compared to whether you like it or not.
{"type":"bar","title":"Names the engines volunteered, by how many of our brands they appeared against","data":[{"label":"Vultr","value":14},{"label":"Hostinger","value":13},{"label":"Google Cloud Platform","value":10},{"label":"Google Cloud","value":10},{"label":"Cloudways","value":9},{"label":"Box","value":7},{"label":"SiteGround","value":7},{"label":"Google Drive","value":6},{"label":"Dropbox","value":6},{"label":"Oracle Cloud Infrastructure","value":6}],"note":"Not part of the sample; named by the engines on their own."}
Every brand we measured
Visibility is the share of scored answers in which an engine named the brand. Amazon Web Services (AWS) led at 100%; Hugo came last at 0%.
| Brand | Visibility | Answers naming it |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | 100% | 12 of 12 |
| AWS | 100% | 12 of 12 |
| Google Cloud Platform (GCP) | 100% | 12 of 12 |
| Microsoft OneDrive | 100% | 12 of 12 |
| Microsoft Azure | 92% | 11 of 12 |
| Next.js | 92% | 11 of 12 |
| WordPress.org | 92% | 11 of 12 |
| Cloudflare | 83% | 10 of 12 |
| DigitalOcean | 83% | 10 of 12 |
| Sync.com | 83% | 10 of 12 |
| Zoom Phone | 83% | 10 of 12 |
| Nuxt.js | 75% | 9 of 12 |
| Eleventy (11ty) | 67% | 8 of 12 |
| Linode | 67% | 8 of 12 |
| Oracle Cloud | 67% | 8 of 12 |
| Proton Drive | 67% | 8 of 12 |
| Tresorit | 67% | 8 of 12 |
| Dialpad | 58% | 7 of 12 |
| Heroku | 50% | 6 of 12 |
| IBM Cloud | 50% | 6 of 12 |
| pCloud | 50% | 6 of 12 |
| Jekyll | 42% | 5 of 12 |
| Gatsby | 33% | 4 of 12 |
| 8x8 | 25% | 3 of 12 |
| Vonage | 25% | 3 of 12 |
| Alibaba Cloud | 17% | 2 of 12 |
| MEGA | 17% | 2 of 12 |
| Astro | 0% | 0 of 12 |
| Grasshopper | 0% | 0 of 12 |
| Hugo | 0% | 0 of 12 |
What to do with this
- Measure every engine, not one. The spread between the most and least generous engine in this study was 13.3 points. A check against a single engine tells you about that engine.
- Check the role, not just the mention. 48.6% of mentions here put the brand in the alternative slot. Moving from alternative to first recommendation is a positioning problem, not a visibility one.
- Follow the citations, not the keyword list. The engines quoted a wide spread of sources here; digitalocean.com was the single most cited. Earning a place on the pages an engine already reads is what changes an answer.
- Zero is a starting point, not a verdict. 3 of 30 brands scored zero here. The first mention on any engine is the milestone that proves the sources are being read.
- Do not budget for reputation defence you do not need. 84.6% of mentions here were positive. Spend on being present, not on being liked.
What this does not show
- Each brand was measured on the questions our generator writes for that brand, not on one shared question set, so this is an average of per-brand measurements and not a like-for-like ranking.
- Per-brand splits between engines rest on the few questions asked about that brand, not on the full sample of 30.
- These are measurements taken on 2026-09-20. AI answers change; a score here is a reading on that date, not a permanent property of the brand.
Reproduce this
The raw answers are stored per brand, per engine, per question. The figures above come from:
select "brandName", "stratum", "visibility", "mentionCount" from "StudyResult" where "studyId" = 'cmu7swwer002ula04f9y8psr5' order by "visibility" desc
Want the same measurement for your own brand? The free check runs this exact pipeline.
Originally published on GeoBuddy Blog.
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