AI-search marketing loves the idea of one AI-visibility number, a single score for how findable you are across the assistants. The problem is that the assistants are not looking at the same web. Ask them the same question and they reach for different platforms, with barely any overlap. Averaging them into one figure hides the only thing that matters: which engine, and citing whom.
Type the same question into ChatGPT and Perplexity and each hands you a confident answer. What you do not see is that they built those answers from almost entirely different sources. The 5W AI Citation Index (2026) reports that about 47.9% of ChatGPT's top-ten citations point to Wikipedia. Perplexity leans the other way: Discovered Labs (2025) found Reddit accounts for roughly 46.7% of its citations. One assistant is quoting the encyclopedia, the other is quoting the forum.
And the overlap between them is tiny. The same 5W index reports that only about 11% of cited domains appear on both ChatGPT and Perplexity. Nearly nine in ten sites cited by one are absent from the other. These are not two windows onto the same web. They are two different webs.
This is not a quirk of one dataset. We ran our own study across 156 questions on the engines that disclose their sources, and the pattern held: two engines landed on the same source only about 8% of the time, and 91% of cited sources were unique to a single engine. Two independent datasets, an industry index and our own measurement, put cross-engine agreement in the same narrow band, roughly one in ten.
Most AI-search tools still promise a single "visibility score," one figure for how findable you are across the assistants. But if ChatGPT reaches you through Wikipedia and Perplexity never cites you at all, a blended score is the average of two unrelated realities, and it describes neither. It is a guess dressed as a measurement. The moment the engines diverge this hard, the only honest unit is per engine: cited where, by whom, in which answer.
Your existing dashboards will not close the gap either. Google Search Console and Bing both ship first-party AI reports now, but each covers only its own engine, and each reports impressions in its surfaces rather than proof of which source an answer actually named. Neither shows the cross-engine picture, and being fetched is not the same as being cited.
Being named by one engine tells you very little about the others. A page ChatGPT loves through its Wikipedia entry can be invisible in Perplexity, which is busy reading a Reddit thread on the same topic. So the work is engine-specific. Wikipedia presence moves one engine; a genuine, well-regarded presence on Reddit moves another. There is no single home on the web that satisfies all of them at once, which is exactly why a single score falls apart.
Stop chasing one number and start keeping a per-engine map. For each assistant that matters to your audience, check whether you are actually named, and keep the receipt: the answer, and the source it credited. That is what our free check does, and what Unsourced tracks over time, each citation backed by the answer and the named source rather than a blended figure you cannot verify.
There is no such thing as your AI visibility. There is your ChatGPT visibility, your Perplexity visibility, your Google AI visibility, and they are drifting further apart, not closer together. Measure each one, prove each citation, and treat any single "AI score" as what it is: an average of different worlds.
Yes, and the gap is large. The 5W AI Citation Index (2026) reports ChatGPT sends about 47.9% of its top citations to Wikipedia, while Discovered Labs (2025) found Reddit makes up about 46.7% of Perplexity citations. Only around 11% of cited domains appear on both. Our own study across 156 questions found the disclosing engines shared a source about 8% of the time.
Usually not. With cross-engine domain overlap around 11%, being named by one engine is a weak predictor of the others. Each assistant is a separate surface with its own preferred sources.
Only partly. Google Search Console and Bing both ship first-party AI reports now, but each covers only its own engine and reports impressions in its AI surfaces, not proof of which source an answer cited. Neither gives you the cross-engine picture or the citation itself.
It depends which engine your audience uses. Perplexity leans heavily on Reddit, so a genuine, well-regarded Reddit presence can help there, while ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia. No single source satisfies every engine, which is why you measure each one separately.
Check each engine directly and keep the receipt. Unsourced runs your domain across the AI engines and shows where you are named, backed by the answer and the source, instead of a single blended score.
Our own study across 156 questions: the engines agreed on a source about 8% of the time.
Read it →One number cannot average two engines that read different webs.
Read it →See which engines actually cite your domain, per engine, with the answer attached.
Read it →Unsourced captures which AI assistants cite you, proves which crawlers really fetched your pages, and re-checks after you act — evidence, not a score.
© Unsourced, the evidence layer for AI search. Our data and findings are free to quote and cite — please attribute to Unsourced and link to unsourced.app.