Good content material is nice content material, and high web sites are high web sites. These items don’t change. Nevertheless, biases within the coaching information and partnerships can change which sources are talked about by totally different AI Assistants.
AI Assistants can also work barely in another way. By default, they don’t have any notion of internet sites and may make up sources. Taking a look at you ChatGPT.
Some methods are augmented with search, the place they retrieve paperwork first and so they’re much less more likely to hallucinate outcomes. Some bias in the direction of companions that they paid to license the information.
Trying on the high 50 most talked about web sites in Ahrefs Model Radar for AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, solely 7 web sites are within the high 50 outcomes for all of them.
That is throughout ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k Perplexity prompts for the month of June 2025.
Sidenote.
Model Radar isn’t simply one other LLM visibility monitor, we observe a considerable amount of queries throughout all of those methods and you’ll question for any product, service, or model and examine vs opponents. It’s extra like Web site Explorer than it’s Rank Tracker.
Right here’s what Model Radar appears like.
Right here’s the overlap:
And right here’s what’s included in every:
Techniques work in barely alternative ways. For instance:
| Platform | The way it chooses citations |
|---|---|
| Perplexity | Actual-time internet search → ranks → quotes → cites finest matching supply |
| ChatGPT (with searching) | Search → filters for trusted/licensed domains → cites |
| ChatGPT (default) | No citations except prebuilt → could hallucinate |
| Google AI Overviews | From search index → curated quotation listing |
| Bing Copilot | Makes use of Bing search → highlights snippets → consists of citat |
Varied biases and totally different methodologies imply that even for a similar queries, these methods could cite fully totally different web sites.
There are going to be extra biases launched primarily based on the forms of websites blocking AI bots and those who render JavaScript like Google, vs those who don’t, which is many of the remainder of them.
Google AI Overviews lean in the direction of the identical high websites we’re used to seeing in search outcomes. There’s a heavy emphasis on authoritative web sites for well being, finance, encyclopedic information, social media, in addition to a bias for Google-owned properties. Notably lacking are media websites, non-Google leisure websites, and ecommerce websites.
ChatGPT leans extra on publishers and non-Google media, particularly for information, leisure, and sports activities. They’ve licensing offers and partnerships with lots of the cited web sites. ChatGPT doesn’t have a lot round well being or drugs.
Perplexity pulls from a broader worldwide corpus. There are a lot of native and regional manufacturers that weren’t within the high 50 for the opposite AI assistants. Perplexity doesn’t have social web sites or conventional Western media.
