By Lana Plouffe, connexion.me. We put one buying question — “what AI-visibility / AEO monitoring tool should I use” — to ChatGPT and Perplexity, in 24 different phrasings, and published every answer verbatim. 50 vendors got named at least once across the 48 answers. Here is the part worth reading if you build one of those tools, or any product that shows up in an answer-engine shortlist.
Perplexity attached a source list to all 24 of its answers — 472 URLs across 301 distinct domains. ChatGPT (gpt-5.5, called through the public API) returned zero sources on all 24 of its answers: no citation field, no grounding, nothing you can audit. So for ChatGPT you only get to watch the outcome; for Perplexity you get to see the inputs.
Across those 472 citations, the most-cited domain was reddit.com — named in 15 of the 24 answers. Second was linkedin.com, in 10. Third was a single HubSpot blog post, in 8. Individual vendor domains, added together, trailed all three.
| Domain | Answers cited in | Of 24 |
|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 15 | 62.5% |
| linkedin.com | 10 | 41.7% |
| a single HubSpot blog post | 8 | 33.3% |
If you've been treating your own site's SEO as the lever that gets you named in an AI answer, this data says the lever that actually moved was a Reddit thread and a LinkedIn post, not your blog.
50 vendors got named across 48 answers. The top 3 — Profound (21 mentions, 43.8%), Peec AI (20, 41.7%), Otterly.AI (19, 39.6%) — outscored the bottom 40 combined. Forty of fifty vendors in this category got named once or twice, out of 48 chances. If you're one of them, a buyer who asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a shortlist today is very unlikely to hear your name, regardless of how good the product is.
The same method runs across 43 categories on connexion.me — CRM, password managers, and 41 others — each with its own board, its own real mention counts, and its own list of which domains the engines actually cited. If you want to know where your own product stands, look up your category board and your own row: it's free, it's not gated, and it shows the actual answers, not a summary of them. If you're not named, or named less than a competitor you'd expect to beat, the Perplexity citation list for your category is the more useful thing to read next — it tells you which domains to actually be discussed on, not which keywords to add to your homepage.
Full methodology, every question asked, and every answer as returned: the AEO board itself.
I run Connexion — one person, publishing what the answer engines actually say. Corrections and questions go to lana@connexion.me and I answer them myself.