Masoud Azizi
Co-Founder & CMO, Indigo Mars
Treating "AI search" as one single thing is the most common mistake in this space. Google AI Overviews leans heavily on pages that already rank well in traditional search. ChatGPT draws on a mix of its training data and live browsing, favoring sources that are authoritative and recently updated. Perplexity retrieves sources fresh for every single query and has the strongest bias toward recently published content of the three. Optimizing for one doesn't automatically optimize for the others.
Google AI Overviews: Rewards What Already Ranks
Google's AI Overviews draw heavily from its own existing search index, with a real preference for content that's already ranking well through traditional SEO. This means the foundation for AI Overview visibility is, to a meaningful degree, the same foundation as regular Google ranking: solid technical SEO, genuine topical authority, and content Google already trusts enough to rank highly. If a page has never ranked well organically, it has a much harder time getting pulled into an AI Overview regardless of how well-structured it is.
Practical implication: don't treat AI Overview optimization as separate from your existing SEO work. Strengthening a page's traditional ranking is often the single most effective thing you can do to improve its odds of appearing in an Overview too.
ChatGPT: Training Data Plus Live Browsing
ChatGPT's answers draw on two different sources: what it learned during training, and, for many queries, real-time web browsing when a current answer is needed. This mix means ChatGPT can cite something a business published only recently, but it also carries a bias toward sources it already recognizes as authoritative from training — meaning consistent presence and genuine authority over time compounds here, not just a single recent post.
Practical implication: businesses benefit from sustained, consistent publishing rather than a single well-optimized page. Being genuinely recognized as an authority in your category matters more here than any one-time technical trick.
Perplexity: Real-Time Retrieval With a Strong Recency Bias
Perplexity works differently from both of the above. Rather than relying primarily on a static, pre-crawled index the way Google ranks pages, Perplexity retrieves sources live at the moment of each query, then runs them through its own evaluation of authority, structure, and relevance. Of the three platforms, Perplexity shows the clearest and strongest preference for recently published or recently updated content — analysis has found a measurable citation boost for pages updated within roughly the last month. Perplexity is also the most citation-dense of the three, typically referencing more distinct sources per answer than Google Overviews or ChatGPT.
Practical implication: if a page hasn't been touched in a long time, updating it — even lightly, with a current date and a fresh statistic — can measurably help specifically on this platform in a way it might not on the other two. One important technical note: if a site blocks Perplexity's crawler in robots.txt, it's excluded from citation entirely, regardless of content quality — worth confirming this isn't happening on your own site.
What This Means in Practice
The good news: none of this requires three separate strategies. The foundational work — structured data, consistent information across sources, direct-answer content, genuine third-party mentions — helps across all three platforms simultaneously. What differs is where the marginal effort pays off most: strengthening traditional SEO helps Google Overviews specifically; sustained, consistent publishing over time helps ChatGPT specifically; and keeping content current and freshly updated helps Perplexity specifically. A business with limited time can still do the shared foundational work first, then layer in whichever platform-specific adjustment matters most for where its customers are actually searching.
Where to Go From Here
This builds on the broader signals AI systems use to decide what to cite at all — see How AI Overviews and ChatGPT Decide What to Cite, or get the complete picture in the full guide: AI Optimization for Los Angeles Businesses: A Complete Guide.
Not sure which platform your actual customers are using to find businesses like yours? Get in touch — we'll help you figure out where to focus first.
