Every founder I meet now asks some version of the same question: when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in my category, do I come up? Almost nobody has actually tested it. So I did, systematically.

Over two weeks I ran 150 recommendation prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini: ten industries, five buyer-style questions per industry, repeated across all three assistants. Categories ranged from D2C skincare and project management software to business loans and online MBA programmes. I logged every brand cited, where the assistant sourced it when citations were visible, and what those brands had in common. The patterns were far more consistent than I expected.

The Headline Finding: AI Does Not Discover Brands. It Repeats Consensus

The single biggest pattern: assistants overwhelmingly recommend brands that already appear in aggregated third party content. Best-of listicles, comparison articles, review platforms, and category roundups. In my sample, 68 percent of all cited brands appeared in at least three independent listicle-style pages ranking in Google’s top ten for related queries. The assistants are not crawling your homepage and judging your product. They are synthesising what the web already says repeatedly about your category.

The Four Signals Cited Brands Share

What Differed Between the Three Assistants

What to Do With This

This research is a snapshot, not a permanent truth. Assistant behaviour shifts with every model release, which is exactly why I now run this test quarterly for clients. The brands doing this work now are compounding a lead that will be very expensive to close later.

Earning the third party placements this research identifies is the modern half of my link building and digital PR service.