AI answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews
Ask ChatGPT for software and its web search does more than repeat your question. It rewrites it, often adding vendor names you never mentioned. Every Monday, Fast Growth Advisors puts the same 40 B2B buying queries, from HR (human resources) to cybersecurity, to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, on the British market. Our AI answers barometer compares what each engine searches for, what it cites and what holds from one week to the next.
What do ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google answer this week?
Latest measurement: 12 Oct 2026 to 13 Oct 2026, published on 13 Oct 2026. Series started on 23 Sep 2026. A week is published once its run has finished.
Three tables, recorded every Monday by Fast Growth Advisors: the assistants first, then two against Google.
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Google AI Overviews
The four assistants
Answers that trigger a web search
In grey: Answers given from memory, without a web search
Sources cited per answer that searched
Searches phrased in another language than the query
Query words kept in the search
Searches that add a brand absent from the query
Query: best endpoint protection for business
ChatGPT searched: Gartner Magic Quadrant endpoint protection 2025 CrowdStrike Microsoft SentinelOne Sophos Gartner 2026
Brands added: crowdstrike, gartner, microsoft, sentinelone, sophos
Sources kept from one week to the next, same query
Query: comparison ai agents for business
Gemini, measurements of 5 Oct and 12 Oct: 0 sources kept out of 11, 11 dropped, 9 new.
Dropped: airtable.com, eesel.ai, emergent.sh, gartner.com, gumloop.com, jetadmin.io and 5 more
New: agensi.io, aicentralresources.com, blaxel.ai, differenzforce.com, fleeceai.app, medium.com and 3 more
| Indicator | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answers that trigger a web search | 62% | 92% | 57% | 100% |
| Answers given from memory, without a web search | 38% | 8% | 42% | 0% |
| Sources cited per answer that searched | 6.0 | 14.2 | 9.0 | 9.1 |
| Searches phrased in another language than the query | 0% | 0% | 0% | not exposed |
| Query words kept in the search | 55% | 85% | 81% | not exposed |
| Searches that add a brand absent from the query | 50% | 3% | 5% | not exposed |
| Sources kept from one week to the next, same query | 17% | 44% | 27% | 28% |
The four assistants: week by week
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 60% | 100% | 80% | 100% |
| 28 Sep | 75% | 100% | 75% | 100% |
| 5 Oct | 57% | 95% | 68% | 100% |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 62% | 92% | 57% | 100% |
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 40% | 0% | 20% | 0% |
| 28 Sep | 25% | 0% | 25% | 0% |
| 5 Oct | 42% | 5% | 32% | 0% |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 38% | 8% | 42% | 0% |
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 5.9 | 14.4 | 9.6 | 17.4 |
| 28 Sep | 5.8 | 14.4 | 9.3 | 16.2 |
| 5 Oct | 5.9 | 14.1 | 9.1 | 16.4 |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 6.0 | 14.2 | 9.0 | 9.1 |
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 0% | 0% | 0% | not exposed |
| 28 Sep | 0% | 0% | 0% | not exposed |
| 5 Oct | 0% | 0% | 0% | not exposed |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 0% | 0% | 0% | not exposed |
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 57% | 86% | 82% | not exposed |
| 28 Sep | 59% | 86% | 76% | not exposed |
| 5 Oct | 56% | 86% | 79% | not exposed |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 55% | 85% | 81% | not exposed |
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 51% | 0% | 4% | not exposed |
| 28 Sep | 47% | 2% | 11% | not exposed |
| 5 Oct | 48% | 1% | 15% | not exposed |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 50% | 3% | 5% | not exposed |
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | no data | no data | no data | no data |
| 28 Sep | 16% | 57% | 26% | 66% |
| 5 Oct | 23% | 34% | 26% | 56% |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 17% | 44% | 27% | 28% |
What does ChatGPT actually search for when asked for software?
From the first run of the Fast Growth Advisors barometer, on 23 September 2026, our measurements showed a clear gap between the engines. ChatGPT issues several searches for a single question and rewrites its wording far more than Claude and Gemini do. It also adds vendor names the question never mentioned.
Claude and Gemini, for their part, mostly keep the words of the question. What ChatGPT then reads on your own site is covered on the ChatGPT visibility page.
A search that already names vendors is no longer used to discover them: it checks the ones it names.
For a brand, the consequence is direct: missing from the list the engine starts searching with, it has little chance of showing up in what it then finds.
Two indicators in the four assistants table track this every week. First indicator: “Query words kept in the search”. Second: “Searches that add a brand absent from the query”.
The real examples below change every Monday. Neither a ranking nor a recommendation.
What the engines actually searched for
comparison hr software uk
UK HR software comparison payroll, HRIS, BambooHR, Personio, Sage HR, CIPHR, BrightHR, BreatheHR comparison UKBrands added by ChatGPT: bamboohr, breathehr, ciphr, personio, sage
best HR software UK comparison 2026
best hr software uk comparison 2025 2026
ai enterprise search software
best enterprise search software 2026 AI enterprise search vendors Elastic Microsoft AWS Google Coveo Lucidworks Algolia Sinequa YextBrands added by ChatGPT: elastic, lucidworks, microsoft
best AI enterprise search software 2026
best AI enterprise search tools software
best endpoint protection for business
Gartner Magic Quadrant endpoint protection 2025 CrowdStrike Microsoft SentinelOne Sophos Gartner 2026Brands added by ChatGPT: crowdstrike, gartner, microsoft, sentinelone, sophos
best endpoint protection for business 2026
gartner magic quadrant endpoint protection platform leaders 2024 2025
best business intelligence software
top business intelligence tools 2026 comparison Power BI Tableau Looker Qlik SAP Analytics Cloud Domo Sisense YellowfinBrands added by ChatGPT: domo, qlik, tableau
best business intelligence software 2026
gartner magic quadrant analytics and business intelligence platforms 2025 2026 leaders
Do Google and the assistants cite the same sources?
Not necessarily: nothing guarantees that Google and the assistants read the same web.
On the same 40 queries, Fast Growth Advisors also records every week what Google writes in its AI Overviews above its results, and whom it cites. It is a comparison we have not seen published anywhere.
A brand well cited by Google can be missing from an assistant’s sources, and the other way round.
That is what the shared sources table measures: for each assistant, the share of its sources that Google AI Overviews also cites, same query, same week.
Google does not expose the searches it runs. Its own table keeps to three indicators.
Do the assistants cite the same sources as Google?
Share of their sources that Google AI Overviews also cites, same query, same week
Query: data warehouse for small business
Claude cites 17 sources, Google AI Overviews 8, none in common.
Claude: blog.panoply.io, clickhouse.com, dashdb.io, definite.app, fanruan.com, fortegrp.com and 11 more
Google AI Overviews: blog.dataddo.com, business.adobe.com, cloud.google.com, domo.com, learn.microsoft.com, optilise.com and 2 more
| Indicator | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share of their sources that Google AI Overviews also cites, same query, same week | 12% | 8% | 14% | 13% |
Do the assistants cite the same sources as Google?: week by week
| Measured on | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 12% | 16% | 22% | 17% |
| 28 Sep | 8% | 13% | 18% | 16% |
| 5 Oct | 7% | 7% | 19% | 12% |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 12% | 8% | 14% | 13% |
Google AI Overviews
Query: google analytics alternative gdpr
Google AI Overviews, measurements of 5 Oct and 12 Oct: 0 sources kept out of 8, 8 dropped, 8 new.
Dropped: ads-agency.cz, discuss.enonic.com, forum.ghost.org, kreativna-agencija.com, northatlantic.fi, proreactware.com and 2 more
New: abner.app, analytics-alternatives.com, drupart.ie, facebook.com, plausible.io, simpleanalytics.com and 2 more
| Indicator | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|
| Queries where Google shows an AI Overview | 100% |
| Sources cited per AI Overview shown | 7.6 |
| Sources kept from one week to the next, same query | 23% |
Google AI Overviews: week by week
| Measured on | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 100% |
| 28 Sep | 100% |
| 5 Oct | 100% |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 100% |
| Measured on | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|
| 23 Sep | 7.7 |
| 28 Sep | 7.9 |
| 5 Oct | 7.7 |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 7.6 |
| Measured on | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|
| 23 Sep | no data |
| 28 Sep | 44% |
| 5 Oct | 30% |
| 12 Oct – 13 Oct | 23% |
Which domains do the engines cite, sector by sector?
Fast Growth Advisors ranks the cited domains sector by sector, from payroll to data. Their rank depends on how many answers that searched the web cite them, all engines together.
Each sector has 10 queries: 5 comparison, 5 need.
These rankings describe what the engines cite. They pass no judgement on the sites cited.
Most cited domains, by sector
| Rank | Domain | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | peoplemanagingpeople.com | 26% |
| 2 | hibob.com | 22% |
| 3 | youtube.com | 22% |
| 4 | zapier.com | 21% |
| 5 | personio.com | 19% |
| 6 | peoplehr.com | 17% |
| 7 | sage.com | 17% |
| 8 | techradar.com | 17% |
| 9 | capterra.co.uk | 14% |
| 10 | workforce.com | 13% |
| Rank | Domain | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 26% |
| 2 | zapier.com | 22% |
| 3 | reddit.com | 19% |
| 4 | slite.com | 16% |
| 5 | eesel.ai | 14% |
| 6 | hebbia.com | 13% |
| 7 | slack.com | 12% |
| 8 | gartner.com | 11% |
| 9 | blog.hubspot.com | 10% |
| 10 | zendesk.com | 10% |
| Rank | Domain | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | gartner.com | 34% |
| 2 | expertinsights.com | 22% |
| 3 | huntress.com | 19% |
| 4 | techradar.com | 19% |
| 5 | sentinelone.com | 18% |
| 6 | pcmag.com | 16% |
| 7 | microsoft.com | 15% |
| 8 | paloaltonetworks.com | 15% |
| 9 | techrepublic.com | 15% |
| 10 | youtube.com | 13% |
| Rank | Domain | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | domo.com | 25% |
| 2 | gartner.com | 23% |
| 3 | g2.com | 20% |
| 4 | reddit.com | 19% |
| 5 | ovaledge.com | 18% |
| 6 | youtube.com | 17% |
| 7 | atlan.com | 16% |
| 8 | fivetran.com | 16% |
| 9 | integrate.io | 15% |
| 10 | thoughtspot.com | 14% |
Which domains does each engine cite first?
Its 5 most cited domains, over the last week measured by Fast Growth Advisors. Five engines, five cards.
Each card adds the share of citations captured by the top 10 domains. The higher it is, the narrower the circle of sources the engine draws from.
Top five domains cited by each engine
- techradar.com 42%
- gartner.com 15%
- bamboohr.com 8%
- ciopages.com 8%
- learn.microsoft.com 8%
- peoplemanagingpeople.com 19%
- gartner.com 17%
- g2.com 16%
- expertinsights.com 14%
- guideflow.com 13%
- youtube.com 43%
- reddit.com 27%
- gartner.com 21%
- zapier.com 11%
- huntress.com 10%
- learn.g2.com 26%
- g2.com 24%
- zapier.com 22%
- techrepublic.com 19%
- techtarget.com 18%
- youtube.com 54%
- reddit.com 41%
- gartner.com 21%
- zapier.com 14%
- linkedin.com 10%
How are the AI answers collected?
Every Monday at 06:17 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), Fast Growth Advisors puts the 40 queries to the four assistants through their API (application programming interface), with one fixed model each. Google AI Overviews is recorded through a probe located in the United Kingdom. Results are published the same day, around 10:00 UTC.
The models queried are gpt-5-mini for ChatGPT, claude-sonnet-5 for Claude, gemini-3.6-flash for Gemini and sonar for Perplexity. Consumer apps work differently: settings, memory, personalisation. A signed-in user may therefore get another answer than the one recorded here. What this barometer measures is the bare model, under fixed and documented conditions.
For ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, the search country is set to the United Kingdom. Gemini accepts no country setting and searches from France, including for the British queries.
Google AI Overviews is recorded around 06:20 UTC by a DataForSEO probe, and unlike Gemini through the API, its British location is real.
The series started on Wednesday 23 September 2026, then ran every Monday from 28 September, with no history before it. No result is quoted in the copy on this page. A sentence repeating the figures of the tables would be wrong by the following Monday. Finally, Fast Growth Advisors’ own domains, fast-growth.fr and nomo-ia.com, are excluded from every ranking.
Google AI Overviews barometer, September 2026 edition →
What the Google AI Overviews barometer measures →
Which 40 queries are measured?
Always the same ones. Fast Growth Advisors puts them every Monday, on the British market.
Written like real searches, in lower case and without punctuation, the 40 queries cover four sectors (human resources and payroll, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data and analytics). Each has five comparison queries and five need queries. They are the British queries of the four fixed sectors of the Google AI Overviews barometer, frozen on 2 September 2026 and written for this market rather than translated from the French set.
The 40 queries measured
HR and payroll
- best hr software for small business
- comparison hr software uk
- best applicant tracking system uk
- best payroll software uk
- best employee onboarding software
- hr software for growing companies
- employee time tracking software
- absence management software uk
- workforce scheduling software
- hr analytics software
Artificial intelligence
- best ai assistant for business
- comparison ai chatbot for business
- best ai coding assistant
- best ai content generation tools
- comparison ai agents for business
- ai document analysis software
- ai knowledge base software
- ai invoice processing software
- ai customer relationship tool
- ai enterprise search software
Cybersecurity
- best endpoint protection for business
- best antivirus for business uk
- comparison siem solutions for business
- best password manager for business
- best threat detection software
- vulnerability management saas
- phishing awareness training for staff
- identity and access management software
- cloud backup for business uk
- email security solution for business
Data and analytics
- best business intelligence software
- comparison etl tools
- best data visualisation tools
- best product analytics tools
- google analytics alternative gdpr
- data quality software for business
- data governance software
- data catalogue software
- data warehouse for small business
- kpi dashboard software
How are the eleven indicators calculated?
Eleven indicators, in three groups and in the order of the tables: seven for the four assistants, one comparing their sources with Google’s, three for Google AI Overviews. Fast Growth Advisors computes them engine by engine, with the same method every week.
For the four assistants.
“Answers that trigger a web search”: the share of answers for which the engine looked things up on the web rather than answering from memory.
“Answers given from memory, without a web search”: its complement, the two add up to 100%.
“Sources cited per answer that searched”: the average count of distinct domains cited.
“Searches phrased in another language than the query”: searches written in French on the British market. Those whose language cannot be determined are set aside.
“Query words kept in the search”: for each search, the share of the query’s meaningful words it contains, on average. Stop words and “best” are left out, accents ignored.
“Searches that add a brand absent from the query”: the share of searches naming a brand that the user never mentioned in the query.
“Sources kept from one week to the next, same query”: the Jaccard index, meaning the domains shared by two readings divided by all the domains cited in either. It equals 1 when the sources are identical and 0 when none is carried over. Two consecutive readings are compared, no more than eight days apart.
Perplexity does not publish its searches, so its column reads “not exposed” for the three indicators about them.
How is Google compared with the assistants, and with which caveats?
Through one shared indicator, the share of common sources, then through 3 indicators specific to Google AI Overviews.
Fast Growth Advisors also frames the brand indicator with three caveats.
Between the assistants and Google. “Share of their sources that Google AI Overviews also cites, same query, same week”: for each assistant, the share of the domains it cites that Google also cites in its AI Overview.
For Google AI Overviews. “Queries where Google shows an AI Overview”. “Sources cited per AI Overview shown”, the average number of domains an AI Overview cites. And “Sources kept from one week to the next, same query”, computed as for the assistants.
Three caveats frame the brand indicator and the examples. A brand is only recognised if a domain bearing its name was cited by one of the five engines the same week, on the same market. It is only counted if the engine wrote it as a proper noun, starting with a capital letter or a digit. Generic platforms (AI engines, YouTube, Reddit, GitHub) never count. Behaviour depends on the model: another OpenAI model, measured on 3 September 2026, slipped the site: operator into most of its searches. Finally, the examples name vendors because the engine wrote them.
Any share computed on fewer than ten items is not shown. “No data” marks a measurement that does not exist yet.
Only valid host names count as domains. An engine that returned no answer during the week shows up as a gap, dated, with its reason. A single failed call is not a gap: it only lowers the sample size of that cell.
FAQ
Why publish a weekly series rather than a ranking?
Because a generative AI answer changes from one run to the next. A ranking built on a single reading mixes trend and chance, with no way to tell them apart. Fast Growth Advisors puts the same 40 queries to the same models every Monday. The gap between two weeks then becomes readable, and a one-off anomaly stops looking like a lasting shift.
Does being cited by Google AI Overviews mean being cited by ChatGPT?
Not necessarily. Google and the assistants do not necessarily draw on the same sources. A domain cited by AI Overviews can be missing from ChatGPT’s answers, and the other way round. The barometer measures, for each assistant, the share of its sources that Google AI Overviews also cites on the same query. That is the indicator to watch before concluding that visibility won in Google carries over to the assistants.
Why does ChatGPT add brands to my question?
The Fast Growth Advisors barometer measures, every week, what ChatGPT does, not what it wants. When it searches the web from a category question, a good share of its searches already name vendors that were absent from the question. Those of Claude and Gemini almost never do. Where those names come from, the measurement does not say. It does show the consequence for a vendor: if it does not appear in those searches, it has little chance of being found by them.
How does it differ from the Google AI Overviews barometer?
Same questions, two uses. Once a month, a dedicated edition of the Google AI Overviews barometer analyses what Google writes above its results and whom it cites. Once a week, the AI answers barometer records Google and four assistants side by side. Measurements are stored apart, so a monthly edition stays reproducible and the figures of the two pages never mix.
How should a cell without a figure be read?
Any share computed on fewer than ten items says more about chance than about the engine, so its cell shows no figure. “Not exposed” marks an engine that does not publish its searches, such as Perplexity. “No data” marks a measurement that does not exist yet, for example source carry-over while the series has only one week.
Next in this series:
Measure AI visibility, the method and the instruments →