A lot of AEO advice treats "getting cited by AI" as one skill. It isn't. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini decide what to cite in three different ways, pulling from different indexes and trusting different source types. A page built for one can do nothing for another. Here's what the research actually shows for each, and what's worth doing about it.
ChatGPT rewards its own index and your own domain
ChatGPT leans on Bing more than its reputation suggests. A Seer Interactive study found 87% of ChatGPT's citations matched Bing's own top results, against 56% for Google - a finding from February 2025, so treat it as a data point rather than this year's number, but the underlying mechanic (OpenAI's retrieval partnership with Bing) hasn't been publicly reversed. Bing Webmaster Tools is still worth setting up, and most sites skip it.
Once a page is in ChatGPT's pool, Semrush's breakdown of its sources shows business and service pages taking 50% of citations, well ahead of news (9.5%), blogs (8.3%), and ecommerce (7.6%). And a brand's own domain does real work here: separate research comparing ChatGPT and Claude found ChatGPT drawing 60.9% of its answers from a brand's own site, against just 31.6% for Claude. ChatGPT is the one platform in this comparison where owned content is the main lever, not a supporting one.
To get cited: confirm GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot aren't blocked in robots.txt (a shockingly common accident, worth checking directly), and set up Bing Webmaster Tools. Then build out your own site as the primary source, rather than leaning on third-party coverage to do the work for you.
Claude barely searches the live web, and leans on the press when it does
Claude answers most questions from memory, not a live search. A July 2026 study of 95,000 Claude search records found retrieval frequency swinging from 9 times in 10 for a prompt like "best CRM 2026" down to 1 in 34 for "how to pick a CRM." When Claude does search, the index behind it looks like Brave, not Google or Bing - independently supported by Anthropic's own subprocessor list and a parameter in Claude's search tool named BraveSearchParams.
Once Claude reads a page, it favours national press and review sites (52% and 49% of citations) well ahead of a brand's own domain (31.6%). Reddit and forums barely register, at 8.3%. This is close to the inverse of ChatGPT's pattern.
To get cited: check whether your domain is indexed in Brave Search specifically, since ranking on Google tells you little about Claude. Then put the next unit of effort into earning press and review coverage rather than publishing more on your own site - Claude converts that coverage at a rate your own domain doesn't match.
Gemini's link to Google rankings is real, but weaker than most advice assumes
This is the one claim worth correcting directly. Advice still circulates saying a Google top-ten ranking is close to a guarantee of an AI Overview citation. Ahrefs' most recent analysis, covering 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs, found only 38% of cited pages also ranked in Google's top ten, down from 76% in the same study run in July 2025. Some of that fall is Ahrefs improving its own detection methods rather than Google changing behaviour, so the two figures aren't perfectly comparable, but a separate BrightEdge analysis using different methodology put the overlap at just 17%, which points the same direction.
Google's own fan-out process explains a good part of the gap: a single search can be split into several related sub-queries behind the scenes, and a page that performs well across those sub-queries can get cited without ranking for the exact term you're tracking. Ranking for one keyword is no longer the whole test.
Google's separate AI Mode product shows an even wider gap. A Moz study of roughly 40,000 queries found 88% of AI Mode citations don't match the organic top ten for the same query, pulling instead from YouTube, Reddit, and niche authority sites. YouTube in particular is now the single most-cited domain across Google's AI Overviews, according to Ahrefs' Brand Radar tracking, and its citation share has grown 34% in six months.
To get cited: don't treat one top-ten ranking as the job done. Build entity signals Google can find outside the ranking itself - a Wikidata record, a Wikipedia mention if you genuinely qualify for one - and publish video with a full transcript, since that's the format seeing the fastest citation growth right now.
The one thing all three actually agree on
Ahrefs' wider study of 75,000 brands found off-site mentions correlating with AI visibility at 0.66 to 0.71, against just 0.19 to 0.29 for backlinks - and that pattern holds across ChatGPT, Google's AI features, and by extension the platforms above. Getting talked about elsewhere moves the number everywhere. Chasing links from your own outreach campaign barely moves it anywhere.
A few common follow-up questions
If I can only focus on one platform, which should it be?
Whichever one your buyers actually use to research. B2B software buyers lean toward ChatGPT and Claude; consumer and local queries run more through Gemini and Google's AI features. Check your own traffic and enquiry sources before picking one.
Does content built for ChatGPT actively hurt performance on Claude?
No, but it won't help much either. A strong, well-structured owned page is a reasonable baseline everywhere. What differs is where the next hour of effort should go: Bing visibility for ChatGPT, press coverage for Claude. For Gemini, it's entity signals.
How often do these citation patterns change?
Often enough that a single study shouldn't be treated as permanent. The Gemini figures above moved from 76% to 38% in eight months. Check the numbers behind any AEO advice you're given, including this article, against a recent date before acting on it.