Most people are talking about “AI SEO” like it’s a completely new game with brand-new rules.
It isn’t.
At least, not in the way it’s being sold.
Here’s what we’re actually seeing when we analyse AI answers.
When SearchGPT cites sources, 87% of those citations come from Bing’s top results.
Not Google.
Bing.
In fact, only 56% of SearchGPT citations overlap with Google’s results at all.
So if your brand doesn’t really exist on Bing, there’s a good chance it doesn’t exist to SearchGPT either — no matter how well you think you rank on Google.
This is where things get more interesting.
A larger study looking at 30 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity shows that each platform pulls from very different places.
- ChatGPT leans heavily on encyclopaedic sources, with nearly half of its top citations coming from Wikipedia
- Google AI Overviews pulls a lot from Reddit and YouTube
- Perplexity relies on Reddit even more heavily than Google does
Same question.
Different AI platforms.
Completely different source pools.
That’s why AI visibility feels unpredictable for so many brands.
It’s not random — it’s fragmented.
If you want to show up in AI-generated answers, ranking on Google alone isn’t enough anymore.
You need to be visible, consistent, and trusted across multiple indexes and sources — search engines, encyclopaedic sites, community platforms, and the places AI systems already rely on.
That’s the work we focus on at AI Toolbox Studio:
helping brands be understood by AI, not just indexed by one search engine.
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