ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Perplexity: Where Should You Focus?

Treating ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity as interchangeable is the fastest way to waste a GEO budget. They pull from different sources, reward different kinds of content and are used by different kinds of people asking different kinds of questions. The right starting point depends on where your customers already are and what they are trying to do when they ask, not on which platform has the biggest headline user number.

The landscape has shifted faster than most businesses have noticed

For most of 2025, “optimise for AI search” effectively meant “optimise for ChatGPT.” That is no longer true. According to Sensor Tower’s State of AI report, ChatGPT’s global market share of AI assistant usage fell below 50% for the first time in 2026, dropping from 65.3% in December 2024 to 46.4% by May 2026, as users migrated to Google’s Gemini (27.7%) and Anthropic’s Claude (10.3%). ChatGPT is still the largest single platform by a wide margin, but “largest” and “only one that matters” stopped being the same statement partway through this year.

For an Australian business, this means the old default (write for ChatGPT, hope Google follows) is already out of date. The practical question is no longer “should I care about AI search,” it is “which platform’s audience actually looks like my customers.”

Each platform decides what to cite in a genuinely different way

This is the part most generic GEO guides skip, and it is the part that actually determines whether your content gets used. The three platforms are not running the same algorithm with a different logo.

• ChatGPT produces a lot of answers with no visible citations at all, and when it does cite, it leans on editorial trust signals it inherited from traditional web ranking, citing Wikipedia heavily, plus Reddit and established media.
• Perplexity is citation-heavy by design, built to show its sources on almost every answer, and it prioritises freshness and forum discussion over polish. Reddit is consistently its top-cited domain.
• Gemini generates its citations through search-grounded retrieval tied to Google’s own index, which is why strong conventional SEO and Google visibility tend to carry over into Gemini results more directly than they do into ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Semrush’s analysis of 325,000 prompts across ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode and Perplexity found LinkedIn was the second most-cited domain overall, behind only Reddit, but citation rates for it varied sharply by platform: 14.3% of ChatGPT Search responses, 13.5% of Google AI Mode responses, and just 5.3% of Perplexity responses. Being well cited on one platform is genuinely not a proxy for being cited on the others.

A decision framework: where should your business focus first?

Instead of a generic ranking, work through which of these three descriptions fits your business best.

You are a local service business (trades, clinics, real estate, hospitality)

Start with Gemini and Google’s AI surfaces. Because Gemini’s citations are grounded in Google’s own index, and because the vast majority of Australians researching a local business still start on Google, the highest-leverage first move is usually strengthening the same foundations that win Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode: clear schema markup, an accurate, complete Google Business Profile, and structured, extractable content on your core service pages. Work you do here compounds into both traditional SEO and Gemini visibility at once, which makes it the most efficient starting point for a local business with limited resources.

You sell to researchers, comparers or B2B buyers

Start with Perplexity. Its audience is smaller than ChatGPT’s but skews heavily towards people actively comparing options, reading reviews and cross-checking claims before a considered purchase or vendor decision, exactly the mindset behind a citation-dense answer format. Because Perplexity draws so heavily on forum discussion and up-to-date detail, a real presence in relevant industry discussion (Reddit threads, review sites, comparison content with genuine specifics) matters more here than it does on ChatGPT or Gemini. If your buyers do due diligence before they contact you, this is where being cited pays off fastest.

You are targeting broad consumer awareness or a general information query

Start with ChatGPT, on scale alone. Even at 46.4% share and falling, it still has the largest raw audience of any AI assistant, having passed 1 billion weekly active users in August 2026, so if your goal is broad brand awareness across a general audience rather than a narrow, high-intent segment, it remains the biggest single opportunity. Because so many of its answers carry no visible citation at all, the more realistic goal here is being confidently and accurately described when someone asks about your category or your brand by name, which depends on clean, consistent information about your business existing across the web (schema, directories, reviews, your own site), not on winning a citation slot in every answer.

Do not skip the foundations that all three share

Whichever platform you start with, some groundwork benefits every AI engine at once, and there is no reason to build it three separate times:

• Structured data and entity clarity. All three platforms need to understand who you are, what you do and where you operate before they will confidently name you. This is the same work covered in our guide to schema markup for Australian local businesses.
• Evidence-dense, specific content. Vague marketing copy gives an AI nothing quotable. Specific numbers, named processes and clear comparisons give it something to lift into an answer.
• Freshness. Perplexity and Claude both skew towards recently updated content more than ChatGPT does, so a page that has not been touched in two years is working against itself on at least one major platform.
• Off-site presence. Because Reddit and LinkedIn show up so consistently across every platform’s citation data, genuine participation in relevant industry discussion is no longer optional groundwork, it is now part of the visibility stack.

Measure before you decide, then measure again after

Do not pick a platform on instinct alone. If you already have some traffic, check which platforms are actually sending you visits right now (our guide on tracking AI search traffic covers the GA4 setup) and which ones show impressions in Search Console’s AI Overviews report. That existing signal, even a small one, is a better guide to where your specific audience already is than any industry-wide statistic. Then revisit the split every quarter. Market share moved nearly 19 percentage points between ChatGPT and its rivals in under eighteen months this cycle; a framework built on this year’s numbers will need checking again well before this time next year.

The bottom line

ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are not three flavours of the same channel. They have different audiences, different citation logic and different strengths, and a business trying to win all three at once with a limited budget usually ends up meaningfully present on none of them. Match the platform to your customer (Gemini for local services searching on Google, Perplexity for considered B2B and comparison-heavy purchases, ChatGPT for broad consumer scale), build the structured, evidence-dense foundations that help on all three regardless, and let your own analytics tell you when it is time to expand.

Not sure which platform your customers are actually using to find businesses like yours? Book a free strategy call or explore our AI Search and GEO services, including our Generative Engine Optimisation service, and we will show you exactly where you stand across each one.