The most-recommended brand across our 39 buyer questions is Toptal — 10 mentions, more than any other company. Every single one came from ChatGPT. Perplexity and Gemini have never heard of it. And Toptal is not the exception: 79% of brands exist in exactly one engine's world.
39 buyer questions · 117 answers · 646 distinct brands · July 2026 · US / English · all three engines
Toptal was the most-named brand in the study — 10 mentions across 117 answers, more than any other company. It is also, as far as Perplexity and Gemini are concerned, not a thing that exists.
Sit with what that means. If you benchmark your AI visibility against Toptal — the category's apparent AI darling — and you only ever check ChatGPT, you'd conclude they have solved this. Check Perplexity and they're nowhere. Two-thirds of the market cannot see the market leader.
You cannot know how you're doing from one engine.
Not directionally. Not roughly. The #1 brand in this study scores 10 on one engine and 0 on the others.
Toptal is not a quirk. It's the normal case, drawn in bold.
Of 646 brands, only 51 are known to all three engines. Four out of five exist inside exactly one engine's answers.
This is the "three separate games" finding from our first report, restated at the level that actually matters to you. It isn't just that the engines return different lists. It's that the overwhelming majority of companies in this market are visible to exactly one of the three — and because none of this shows up in analytics, almost none of them know which.
Here's what stops this being a doom story. Look at the 20 most-named brands and the pattern inverts: 18 of the top 20 are known to two or three engines.
Finsweet (9 mentions), HubSpot (7), ActiveCampaign (7), Flow Ninja (6), Pipedrive (6), Zoho CRM (6), Freshdesk (6), Pendo (6) — all three engines name every one of them. Only Toptal and one other are single-engine acts.
So the market has two regimes:
A small shared set all three engines have converged on. Enough presence that every engine's retrieval finds them.
Each living inside exactly one engine's answer set, invisible to the other two.
The gap between the tail and the top isn't fame. It's coverage.
The implication is not "you can't win." It's that cross-engine presence is the thing that separates the two regimes — and it's a reachable state, because the shared set is 51 companies deep, not five.
They don't even name the same number of companies.
| Engine | Brands per answer (mean) | Range | Distinct brands |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 8.9 | 0–13 | 296 |
| Perplexity | 8.3 | 2–18 | 292 |
| Gemini | 7.2 | 0–23 | 246 |
ChatGPT is the most consistent recommender — it names the most brands on average and never went above 13. Gemini is the most volatile: it named nothing at all on some questions and 23 companies on another. Perplexity never returned an empty answer.
A practical read: Gemini's shortlists are shorter on average, which makes each slot scarcer and being absent more costly.
The most-recommended brand in this study scores 10 on ChatGPT and 0 elsewhere. One engine tells you nothing about the other two.
Not "ranked #1 on one." Only 8% of brands manage it — that's the moat, and it's 51 companies wide, not five.
If you're in the 79%, you don't know. Optimising for the engine that already names you is the most common wasted effort in this category.
They may be a one-engine act, and you'd be copying a strategy two-thirds of the market can't see.
| Metric | Scope | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Distinct brands named | all 3 engines, 39 questions | 646 |
| Named by exactly 1 engine | all 3 engines | 509 = 79% |
| Named by exactly 2 engines | all 3 engines | 86 = 13% |
| Named by all 3 engines | all 3 engines | 51 = 8% |
| Most-named brand | all 3 engines | Toptal · 10 mentions |
| Engines naming Toptal | all 3 engines | 1 of 3 (ChatGPT) |
| Of the top 20, single-engine | all 3 engines | 2 of 20 |
| Brands per answer — ChatGPT | 39 answers | mean 8.9 · range 0–13 |
| Brands per answer — Perplexity | 39 answers | mean 8.3 · range 2–18 |
| Brands per answer — Gemini | 39 answers | mean 7.2 · range 0–23 |
| Distinct brands — ChatGPT | 39 answers | 296 |
| Distinct brands — Perplexity | 39 answers | 292 |
| Distinct brands — Gemini | 39 answers | 246 |
verify-numbers.py recomputes every figure above straight from it.Mostly not. Of 646 brands named across 117 answers, 79% were named by exactly one engine; only 51 brands (8%) are known to all three.
Toptal, with 10 mentions — every single one from ChatGPT. Perplexity and Gemini never named it once.
ChatGPT a mean of 8.9 (range 0–13), Perplexity 8.3 (2–18, never empty), Gemini 7.2 (0–23, the most volatile).
Same method, pointed at your domain. We'll ask all three engines your buyers' questions and show you which ones name you — and which ones name someone else.
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