Last month, we ran an experiment. We took 500 brands across 12 categories — SaaS, DTC, fintech, healthcare, e-commerce, you name it — and asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity the same set of 20 buying-intent prompts for each category. Things like "what's the best CRM for small teams" or "recommend a project management tool for agencies."

We logged every response. Every brand mention. Every citation. Then we cross-referenced with what those brands actually do on the web.

Here's what jumped out.

B2B SaaS dominates. DTC barely registers.

Of the 500 brands, 73% of B2B SaaS companies got at least one mention across the four engines. For DTC brands? 19%. That's not a typo.

The reason is structural. B2B SaaS companies tend to have comparison pages, detailed feature breakdowns, and third-party reviews on G2 and Capterra. DTC brands have product pages and Instagram. AI engines don't browse Instagram.

If you're a DTC brand reading this: your beautiful Shopify store is basically invisible to AI. The content that AI pulls from — long-form reviews, Reddit threads, comparison articles — you probably don't have any of it.

Comparison pages are the single biggest predictor

Brands with a dedicated "vs" or comparison page were 3.4x more likely to be mentioned in AI responses than brands without one. This was the strongest signal in our entire dataset.

It makes sense. When someone asks "what's better, Notion or Asana?", the AI needs a source that directly addresses that comparison. If you've written that page, you're the source. If you haven't, someone else is — and they might not frame you favorably.

We saw this play out with a mid-size project management tool (I won't name them, but they're in our AI Brand Index). They had zero AI mentions in January. They published six comparison pages in February. By March, they were showing up in 40% of relevant prompts on ChatGPT.

Third-party mentions matter more than your own content

Brands mentioned on at least 3 independent review sites had a 61% mention rate across AI engines. Brands only mentioned on their own site? 8%.

AI engines are doing something similar to what Google did with backlinks — they're using third-party validation as a trust signal. If G2, Capterra, and a couple of industry blogs all say you're good at X, the AI is comfortable recommending you for X.

One pattern we didn't expect: Reddit mentions were disproportionately influential. Brands that showed up positively in Reddit threads were 2.1x more likely to be recommended by ChatGPT specifically. OpenAI's Reddit data partnership is clearly showing up in the outputs.

Engine-by-engine differences are real

The four engines don't agree nearly as much as you'd think:

  • ChatGPT favors well-known brands and leans heavily on Reddit and review sites. It mentioned market leaders 4x more than challengers.
  • Claude was the most likely to mention mid-market and niche tools. It seemed to weight detailed documentation and technical content more heavily.
  • Gemini pulls aggressively from Google's own index. Brands ranking well in traditional Google search had a 2.8x advantage in Gemini responses.
  • Perplexity cites sources explicitly, and it strongly favors recent content. Blog posts from the last 90 days were cited 5x more than older content.

This means optimizing for one engine isn't enough. A brand that's visible on ChatGPT might be completely absent from Claude. We saw this with 34% of the brands in our dataset — mentioned on one engine, invisible on the others.

Schema markup is table stakes

Brands with Organization, Product, and FAQ schema markup had a 47% higher mention rate than those without. It's not glamorous, but structured data helps AI engines parse what you do, what you cost, and who you serve.

The brands with the highest AI visibility scores in our index almost all had comprehensive schema. The ones at the bottom almost never did.

What this means for you

If you're not tracking how AI engines talk about your brand, you're flying blind. And if you're not actively creating the content that AI engines pull from — comparison pages, structured data, third-party reviews — you're ceding that ground to competitors who are.

We built a free tool that shows you exactly where you stand. It takes 60 seconds. No signup required. Run it, see your baseline, and then decide if this is something you need to act on.

For most brands, the answer is yes.