When I started in marketing, SEO was barely a thing. Keyword stuffing was the standard play, and the shady tactics weren't against the rules yet. Facebook was where you saw photos from friends and family. It didn't have ads. Instagram didn't exist.

The channels I work in today would be unrecognizable to me back then. The job hasn't changed at all, though. It has always been one thing: get your brand in front of buyers where they're actually looking. Search, social, email, events, it's all just versions of "be where the buyer is."

AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is new to me, the same way it's new to most marketers. But the principle under it is the oldest one we have. Meet your buyers where they are, or you're not in the conversation. I just didn't expect "where they are" to be the same thing dressed in 5 different ways.

The new version of an old rug-pull

Picture spending a decade getting good at SEO. You learn how Google works, you earn your rankings, you can finally predict it. Then you find out a big share of your buyers quietly switched to a second search engine. It looks the same, but this one ignores your website and leans on Reddit comments and YouTube videos instead.

That's roughly what AI search is doing right now. Except it's worse than two engines ranking the same pages differently. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity don't just rank sources differently. They pull from largely different sources to begin with.

You can be the brand ChatGPT recommends and a complete unknown on another engine, at the same time, and have no idea. That's being in the conversation for some of your buyers and invisible to the rest. You might feel like you have it handled, but you're silently missing.

I ran my own category to see it

I asked ChatGPT and Google's AI the same questions, the kind a real buyer asks: "what's the best tool for...", "alternatives to...", "what do i use to...". The sources each one cited are completely different.

ChatGPT used tools' own websites, G2 pages, and press releases. The Google results were mostly Reddit posts and YouTube videos. Same questions, different worlds. I would have been wrong by half if I had optimized for one and assumed the other was covered.

It isn't just my run

My competitors have already proven this at a scale I can't.

Profound, one of the biggest companies in AI visibility, published an analysis of 680 million citations (as of mid 2025). Their finding: the engines barely overlap. Wikipedia was ChatGPT's most-cited source (maybe a different problem to dig into there) at 7.8% of all citations. Reddit's share swung wildly by engine, roughly 1.8% on ChatGPT, 2.2% on Google's AI Overviews, and 6.6% on Perplexity. In their words, "each AI platform demonstrates unique characteristics in both overall citation patterns and top source distributions."

A separate study of 30 million sources, run by Peec AI and reported by Search Engine Land in March 2026, found Reddit is the single most-cited domain across AI answers, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn, with Perplexity leaning especially hard on Reddit, LinkedIn, and G2 for B2B questions.

Different methods, different dates, same conclusion: there is no one "AI search." There are several, and they read different things.

Why the engines disagree

Think of them as different personalities. One reads the official records: encyclopedias, review sites, press releases. Another asks what is everyone on Reddit and YouTube actually saying? Neither is wrong. They're sourcing trust in different places, which means the work to show up in each one is different too.

My own brand wasn't cited. I expected that.

I pointed my own tool at my own company first. We weren't cited a single time, on any engine. That visibility score was, and still is, 0.

I wasn't surprised. Why would a new brand show up? The crawlers haven't reached me. I'm not linked from anywhere yet. There are no reviews, no product profiles, no Reddit posts, no roundups with my name in them. There was simply nothing for it to find.

AI visibility is earned and found in the places each engine trusts: links, reviews, profiles, mentions, the third-party footprint. If those don't exist, you don't exist, no matter how good your site is.

So what do you do with this

Do the same thing marketers have always done. Meet your buyers where they are. The only change is that "where they are" is now several AI engines that each read different sources.

Find out where you stand, by engine, not in whole.
See which sources each engine cites for your category, then go earn a place.
Stop assuming visibility in one engine means visibility everywhere. It usually doesn't.

Open ChatGPT and Gemini or Claude, ask them the same question about your category. Something like "what's the best x." Then compare who they name and what they cite. Your results will be different.

If you'd rather have that done automatically across all the major engines, scored and tracked over time, that's what I'm building with AnswerScout. You can try it free for 5 days, no credit card, at answerscout.ai. The first step costs nothing more than a few minutes and a little honesty about what you find.