Status: Shipped
Theme: Week 3 Day 5. Head-to-head on how the 3 AI engines pick who gets cited. Only 11% domain overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Topic source: 30-Day Content Calendar Day 19 (Post 1 carousel · 11 slides).
Note: Day 18 (3 Schema Types) shipped earlier today. Day 19 runs same-day to keep weekly cadence on track.
Hook
Three AI engines. Three different gatekeepers. Only 11% of cited domains overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity. A brand visible in one can be invisible in the other.
Key stats used
- ChatGPT 54.7% market share, runs on Bing, 87% citation match with Bing top results, Wikipedia + Reddit drive 25%+ US citations (Wikipedia 13.15% + Reddit 11.97%, Wikipedia 47.9% of top-10 citations)
- Perplexity 1.5% share but 370% growth, 21.87 citations per response, Reddit = 46.7% of top citations, RAG over 200B URLs, 3-layer reranking, 55% Top-3 rate for direct Q&A blocks
- Gemini 27.4% share fastest growing, 52.15% citations from brand-owned domains, 134-167 word self-contained passages, 15+ Knowledge Graph entities per 1000 words, Gemini 3 replaced 42% of cited domains
- Only 11% domain overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity
Sources used
- Whitehat SEO: AI engines comparison citations whitehat-seo.co.uk/blog/ai-engines-comparison-citations
- Yext: How ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude decide what to cite yext.com/blog/how-chatgpt-perplexity-gemini-claude-decide-what-to-cite
- Seer Interactive: 87% of SearchGPT citations match Bing's top results seerinteractive.com/insights/87-percent-of-searchgpt-citations-match-bings-top-results
- 5W: Wikipedia + Reddit drive over 25% of ChatGPT citations prnewswire.com/news-releases/wikipedia-and-reddit-now-drive-over-25-of-chatgpt-citations-in-the-us
- Stackmatix: Perplexity optimization strategy 2026 stackmatix.com/blog/perplexity-ai-optimization-strategy
- Otterly: Perplexity SEO 2026 otterly.ai/blog/perplexity-seo
- AuthorityTech: 9 source signals for Perplexity authoritytech.io/blog/how-to-get-cited-in-perplexity-ai-2026
- Ziptie.dev: AI Overviews source selection ziptie.dev/blog/google-ai-overviews-source-selection