How AI assistantschoose the brandsthey name.

Across the verticals we have measured, Perplexity's answers use the same construction again and again when they rank brands. Three examples, from real estate, home decor and skincare:

The engine is describing its own method: it is counting how often a name appears across the pages it retrieved. Page quality matters less than presence on the pages that get retrieved. That is why the same two or three brands hold a category's answers on every engine, and why nobody can buy their way in.

The engines will read a brand's own site as a source and still recommend someone else. Vaaree's domain was the second most cited source in the home decor answers we ran, above ikea.com, and Vaaree was named in 16 of 30 answers while Pepperfry was named in 23.

Supertails's site was the single most cited source in the pet care answers, and the brand was still absent from 10 of 30. Several of those answers cited supertails.com and then recommended Royal Canin.

The payroll study shows the same thing at category scale. Waggex and Trilliant Software both had pages read by the engines as sources, and neither was named to the buyer in any of the 159 answers. A citation is the engine using your page to write about your competitor.

In the payroll study, five companies were on Google's first page for one of the forty questions on 28 August 2026 and were named in none of the 159 answers. The query each one ranks for is beside its name.

The same brand can be strong on one engine and weak on another, because the engines retrieve different kinds of pages. Across the HRMS answers we ran, ChatGPT cited vendor pages most (greythr.com and keka.com in roughly two thirds of its answers) while Perplexity cited listicles and LinkedIn posts. HROne was named in 13 of 15 Perplexity answers and 6 of 15 ChatGPT answers for the same fifteen questions.

The four-engine payroll study found the same spread in the other direction: HROne was named 22 times by Google AI Overviews, 13 by Perplexity, 12 by ChatGPT and 5 by Gemini, out of forty questions each.

The weak engine is whichever one reads the page type the brand's ecosystem has not published. And when a brand scores identically on both engines, as Zimyo did at 5 of 15 on each, the problem is not engine behaviour. It is that the brand is simply not on the sources either engine reads.

Engines award a positioning claim to whoever has a quotable page for it. Asked for the best free billing software for Indian businesses, the answers went to Zoho Invoice on the strength of one sentence on its site, 100% free for Indian businesses forever, while Vyapar's real free tier went unnamed because no page states it that plainly.

Brand vocabulary can work against you. RAS Luxury Skincare was named in every answer to questions that used its own phrases, farm to face and the brand name, and in 3 of 26 answers to questions in the plain category language buyers use. A category-of-one phrase is retrieved as a fact about the brand, not as membership of the category people ask about.

Ask an engine whether a brand is good and it goes looking for reviews, and it quotes the worst profile it finds rather than the largest. AiSensy has a rating above four on G2 from more than a hundred reviews. A thirteen-review Trustpilot profile at 1.9 out of 5 is what both engines quoted into the answer to "Is AiSensy good?".

Premium-priced brands with thin owned trust content are the most exposed to this, because there is nothing else for the engine to read.

Petpooja publishes no rupee price on its site. Asked what it costs, ChatGPT quoted G2's US dollar tiers and Perplexity quoted a third-party estimate in rupees. The question "cheapest cloud-kitchen POS" was won outright by a vendor almost nobody has heard of, on the strength of a published price of one hundred rupees a month.

Vyapar's own pages state two different prices, one in rupees and one in dollars, and the engines quote both back to buyers. Whatever a site says about price, consistently or not, becomes the answer.

• Count first. Run the buyer's questions and find out which sources the engines read for your category. Those pages, not your homepage, decide the shortlist.
• Get onto the recurring sources. The action differs by vertical: user reviews and Reddit for D2C, clinical-grade content for health, directory and regulator listings for real estate.
• State your positioning in one plain sentence on a page the crawler can reach, in the words buyers use, with a rupee price beside it.
• Consolidate the review profiles the engines quote from, especially the small angry ones.
• Measure per engine. A brand can be fine on ChatGPT and invisible on Perplexity, and the fix is different for each.