Jakub, who builds Be Recommended and Inithouse, posted an audit on Indie Hackers rather than an opinion. Over roughly eight weeks in the spring of 2026 he says he ran more than 200 queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, covering his own products plus a benchmark set of indie tools, and scored every answer on whether a brand was mentioned, whether it was actually linked, and which domains got used as sources.
The strategy
The headline number is the gap between engines. He reports that "ChatGPT cites brands just 0.59% of the time" against Perplexity at "13.05%". In his words, "that is a 46x difference." Perplexity runs a live web search on every query, so it pulls in roughly three times as many sources per answer.
The finding that changes what you do is the overlap. He says "only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT are also cited by Perplexity." Winning in one engine tells you almost nothing about the others, so he treats each as a separate distribution channel with its own work.
That produced four different jobs. For Perplexity, publish constantly: "Fresh content every week. Comparison posts, changelogs, 'alternatives to X' pieces," because freshness is what a live search rewards. For Gemini, get indexed properly in Search Console and publish on platforms it already crawls, such as Dev.to. For Claude, which he says reads deeper into pages, invest in "Better product pages, clearer feature descriptions, README files for open source components." For ChatGPT, stop pushing: "We stopped trying to game ChatGPT visibility for new products. Instead, we focus on getting into authority roundups and listicles naturally."
Why it works
The engines have different architectures, so they have different weak points. One searches the live web and can be reached this week with a fresh comparison page. One leans on an index you can influence through ordinary SEO. One reads documentation carefully. One appears to lag behind consensus and is reached indirectly, through the roundups other people write about you. Averaging all four into a single "AI SEO" plan means doing the wrong work for three of them.
How to get cited by AI search engines
Write down 20 prompts a buyer would actually type. Run them in all four engines and log two columns: which products were named, and which URLs were cited. Publish weekly comparison and alternatives pages for Perplexity, tighten indexing and post on crawled platforms for Gemini, rewrite your docs for Claude, and earn your way into third party listicles for ChatGPT. Rerun the same prompts monthly.
Credit: @jakubinit on Indie Hackers