It is tempting to treat "AI search" as one channel. In practice each engine retrieves, weighs and displays sources in its own way, and your visibility can differ a lot between them on the very same prompt.
Perplexity
Perplexity is built around live web retrieval and shows numbered sources alongside nearly every answer. That makes it the most transparent engine to study: you can see exactly which pages shaped the answer. It tends to reward pages that answer the question directly and are easy to extract from.
Gemini and Google AI Overviews
Google's AI experiences sit on top of Google's own index and ranking systems. Classic SEO fundamentals (crawlability, helpful content, links, structured data) matter a great deal here, which is why we never treat AEO as separate from SEO.
What this means for your plan
- Measure per engine. A single blended number hides where you're winning and losing.
- Study the sources where they're visible. Perplexity's citations are a good map of what the open web says about your category.
- Don't neglect classic SEO. It underpins Google's AI answers.
- Re-test regularly. Engines update their models and retrieval often.
How we report it
Every Citedly report breaks Share of Answer down by engine, so you can see, for example, that you're strong on Perplexity but missing from Google AI Overviews, and put the next month's work where it counts.
Run the free scan to see your split across four engines.
