AI search engines compared: which ones cite brands, and how

AI search engines answer a question with a written response and links to the pages behind it, where a classic search engine hands you a list of results to sort through yourself. In the US, the main ones are ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. In Pew Research Center's survey of February 2026, 44% of American adults said they use ChatGPT, and 60% said they read the AI summaries that appear at the top of search results. Every engine reads its own index, so a brand named by one can be missing from the next.

Google's AI answers are the ones most people meet without choosing them, since AI Overviews show up on their own above regular results. Our guide to Google AI Mode explains how Google's conversational mode picks its links. Outside Google, people choose their engine, and that choice changes which brands they hear about. Hypervisible, the software we make, reads up to five of these engines on identical questions, so a brand can see, engine by engine, where it is named and where it is missing.

The AI search engines people actually use

ChatGPT is far ahead of the other chat assistants, and Google's AI answers reach even more people because they come built into Google Search. The clearest independent count we know of is Pew Research Center's survey of 5,119 U.S. adults, run from February 17 to 23, 2026.

Share of U.S. adults who say they ever use each chatbot, Pew Research Center, survey of February 17 to 23, 2026.
Chatbot	Maker	U.S. adults who use it
ChatGPT	OpenAI	44%
Gemini	Google	24%
Copilot	Microsoft	17%
Meta AI	Meta	14%
Grok	xAI	8%
Claude	Anthropic	6%

About half of U.S. adults (49%) said they use AI chatbots at all, and 42% said they use them to look up information. Age splits the audience sharply: 57% of adults under 50 use ChatGPT, against 28% of those 50 and older. Pew didn't ask about Perplexity, so there's no comparable figure for it.

Google's AI answers play on a different scale. Asked about the AI summaries at the top of search results, 60% of adults in the same survey said they read them, against 30% who said they don't. Google itself reports over 2.5 billion monthly active users for AI Overviews and more than one billion monthly users for AI Mode, worldwide, in figures it published in June 2026.

We kept this comparison to seven engines: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Brave Search, which writes AI answers from an index it built itself. You.com still appears on many lists of AI search engines, but its homepage now sells web search APIs to AI developers, so it isn't in our table.

How each one finds and cites sources

The seven engines fall into four groups by the index they read. Google's engines use Google's index, Copilot uses Bing, Perplexity and Brave run indexes of their own, and ChatGPT mixes its own crawler with outside search providers. That decides which pages can be cited, and which report, if any, tells a site owner about it.

Compiled from the makers' help pages and developer documentation, read on October 22, 2026.
Engine	Index behind the answer	Searches	Citations	Report for site owners
Google AI Overviews	Google Search	Only on searches where Google adds a summary	Links beside the summary	Search Console
Google AI Mode	Google Search	For every question	Links inside the text; plain web links if Google isn't confident	Search Console
Gemini app	Google Search, for part of its answers	Case by case	Sources button on some answers only	None we know of
ChatGPT	OAI-SearchBot crawl and partner search providers	Case by case, or when asked	Citations in the text, plus a Sources list	None we know of
Microsoft Copilot	Bing	Case by case	Hyperlinked citations under the reply	Bing Webmaster Tools
Perplexity	Its own index	For every question	Numbered citations	None we know of
Brave Search	Its own index	When you press Answer with AI	Sources listed with every summary	None we know of

Google: AI Overviews, AI Mode and the Gemini app

AI Overviews and AI Mode run several related searches in Google's index for each question, and they can only cite pages Google has indexed and may show with a snippet. Since August 31, 2026, a toggle in Search Console lets any site leave both features, at a price Google spells out: no more traffic or impressions from them. The Gemini app is a separate product. Google says some of its responses are grounded in Search results, and a robots.txt token called Google-Extended keeps a site's pages out of that grounding with no effect on Google Search. Our guides to AI Overviews and to ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Perplexity go further into each.

Microsoft: Copilot and Bing

Copilot builds its answers from web search results and lists hyperlinked citations under the text, according to Microsoft's transparency note of August 18, 2026. Microsoft's documentation for the workplace version is more precise: Copilot picks a few words out of the prompt, sends them to the Bing search service as a query, and writes its reply from what comes back. On Bing itself, Copilot Search, launched in April 2025, links whole sentences to their sources and lists the cited pages at the bottom. Microsoft also claims that its grounding powers “nearly every major AI assistant in the market,” without naming them.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT goes to the web on its own for questions that need fresh facts, and on demand for the rest. Only sites that admit OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawler can be cited. OpenAI's help page adds that ChatGPT sometimes works with other search providers, rewriting the question into shorter queries, and it points readers to Microsoft's and Shopify's privacy policies. For local questions it uses an approximate location based on the IP address, and the mobile apps can show a map. The ranking side is covered in ChatGPT search and how ChatGPT chooses its sources.

Perplexity and Brave: their own indexes

Perplexity searches the web for every question and numbers its citations, so each claim points to a page you can open. Its crawler, PerplexityBot, is the one to allow. Brave Search runs on an index it built from scratch and offers AI answers through an “Answer with AI” button; Brave says those summaries are based only on web search results and always cite their sources. Its Ask Brave feature goes one step further and turns the results page into a chat.

The best AI search engine for research, shopping and local

No AI search engine wins every job. Our picks: Perplexity for research you need to check, Google AI Mode for local questions and most shopping, ChatGPT for questions you want to talk through, Copilot if your workday runs on Microsoft 365, and Brave if you want an index that belongs to neither Google nor Microsoft.

Our picks, based on each maker's documentation, read on October 22, 2026.
Use	Our pick	Why
Research you need to verify	Perplexity	Searches for every question and numbers each citation
Local businesses	Google AI Mode	Built on Google Search, whose AI answers can draw on the Business Profiles owners keep up to date
Shopping	Google AI Mode, then ChatGPT	Google's Shopping Graph held over 50 billion listings in 2025; ChatGPT adds product carousels and review summaries
Long, open-ended questions	ChatGPT	Keeps the thread and searches when it needs fresh information
Work files plus the web	Microsoft Copilot	The workplace version combines Microsoft 365 data with Bing results
An independent index	Brave Search	Answers come from Brave's own index

For research, Perplexity's numbering makes checking quick: open the third citation and see whether the page says what the answer claims. Any engine on this list can cite the wrong page, and the numbers make the mistake easier to catch. ChatGPT with search comes a close second.

For a plumber or a taco place, Google AI Mode has the edge. Google says its AI answers can draw on Business Profiles, the listings owners maintain with hours, services and reviews. ChatGPT has become a real alternative for local questions: it uses your approximate location, can show a map on mobile, and in the US can show restaurant reservation times from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp.

For shopping, scale favors Google. When it brought shopping to AI Mode in May 2025, Google said its Shopping Graph held more than 50 billion product listings, with over 2 billion refreshed every hour. ChatGPT is better at talking a choice through. Its product picks weigh price, reviews and what you've told it about yourself, though OpenAI points out that labels such as “Budget-friendly” are generated by ChatGPT and that it doesn't verify the reviews behind its summaries.

Every engine here has a free version. AI Mode is part of Google Search, ChatGPT's web search works on the Free plan and even without an account, and Perplexity's free tier includes a limited number of Pro Searches a day. Copilot Search in Bing opened to everyone in April 2025, outside Russia and China. Brave Search is paid for by ads, with a Premium tier that removes them.

What it means for brands

A brand now needs to be readable in several indexes at once and described the same way in each. One that only watches Google sees a single picture out of four.

Open the doors. Check robots.txt and firewall rules for Googlebot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, and verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, since Copilot reads Bing. Microsoft says IndexNow helps AI systems use the most recent version of a page when they write an answer.
Work on the pages you don't own. Google's own guide warns site owners that its AI answers can repeat opinions found in blog posts, videos and forum threads. Review sites, comparison articles and directories shape many shortlists, and your own site is only one of the pages read.
Feed your product data. Google's AI answers can draw on Merchant Center feeds. OpenAI says product data from Shopify merchants reaches ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog, with no extra work from the merchant.
Rank the engines by your buyers. Pew's figures put ChatGPT and Google first for most American audiences, then Gemini. Copilot earns a place if your buyers spend their day in Microsoft 365, and Perplexity if they research hard before buying.

Take a Shopify store that sells trail running shoes. Its catalog reaches ChatGPT through Shopify. Google needs a Merchant Center feed. Copilot needs Bing to have crawled the product pages, and Perplexity needs PerplexityBot to get past the store's firewall. That makes four engines and four separate checks, and a gap in any one of them stays invisible until someone reads the answers.

Paid placement is arriving as well. Google announced ad formats labeled “Sponsored” for AI Mode in May 2026, and OpenAI runs ads in ChatGPT on systems it says are separate from the answers, as our guide to ChatGPT ads explains.

How to check your brand on each one

Read the answers themselves on a fixed list of questions, then add the free reports Google and Microsoft give site owners. The answers show your competitors and what is said about you. The reports only cover your own pages.

The answers themselves, with Hypervisible or by hand. For ChatGPT, Perplexity, the Gemini app and Brave, we know of no report for site owners. Ask the questions your buyers ask, with and without your brand name, and note who is named, in what order, and which pages are cited. Ask again a few weeks later, because answers change between sessions.
Google Search Console. Since August 31, 2026, every site gets insights on AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover: impressions, the pages that appear in AI responses, and the countries where they appear. It covers your verified site only.
Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, counts how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner AI experiences, with the grounding queries behind each citation. Since June 2026 it also gives a Citation Share per query, without naming the other sites. Microsoft says the grounding queries it lists are a sample.

Because answers move from one session to the next, no serious provider promises a fixed place in them, though being cited is something you can work on and measure. The trackers are compared side by side in our review of AI visibility tools.

Checking up to five engines at once with Hypervisible

Hypervisible automates the first step of that list for up to five of the seven engines compared here. We make it, so here are the reasons we point you to it, and where it stops.

Google's AI summaries on every plan. Every plan, the entry one too, measures AI Overviews as well as ChatGPT and Gemini, and the five-engine plans add AI Mode and Perplexity (pricing); 60% of U.S. adults told Pew they read the AI summaries at the top of search results.
One report across indexes. For each engine you get the share of answers that cite your brand, the place where it comes up in the text, where you rank among the rivals cited in those answers, the sites behind them, and the words and tone used about you. Google's index, OpenAI's crawler and Perplexity's own index end up side by side.
Ten countries. Questions are written in each market's language and measured in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France, among others.
An agency behind it. NEXUS GEO, a French agency founded in January 2026 that works only on GEO, makes the software, working from Google and AI data; Martin Noale, who set up the agency, published a public grid of 47 AI visibility criteria.

Copilot, Brave and Claude aren't among its engines and readings come once a week, so Bing Webmaster Tools stays your view of Copilot. To see where you stand before paying for anything, run the free AI visibility checker, also available from the scan page: 10 questions, half describing your sector without your name and half including it, put to three engines (ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews), with all 30 answers read inside 5 to 10 minutes, no credit card, and your results kept in your account.

Your brand

The free analysis asks 10 questions to three AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews), reads the 30 answers in 5 to 10 minutes and keeps your dashboard in your account.

Frequently asked questions

Which is the best AI search engine?

It depends on the job, and our picks follow what each maker documents. Perplexity suits research, since it searches every question and numbers its citations. Google AI Mode suits local and shopping questions, because it draws on Google Search, Business Profiles and the Shopping Graph. ChatGPT suits open-ended questions you want to talk through, and Microsoft Copilot suits work inside Microsoft 365. ChatGPT is the most used of the chat assistants, by 44% of U.S. adults in Pew's February 2026 survey.

What are the top AI search platforms?

By U.S. use, ChatGPT leads: 44% of adults said they use it in Pew Research Center's February 2026 survey, ahead of Gemini (24%), Microsoft Copilot (17%), Meta AI (14%), Grok (8%) and Claude (6%). Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode reach more people through Google Search itself, with 60% of adults saying they read AI summaries at the top of search results. Perplexity, which Pew didn't measure, and Brave Search complete the list of engines built around web answers.

Is ChatGPT a search engine?

ChatGPT is a chat assistant that can also search the web. It looks things up by itself when a question needs recent facts, or because you told it to, and the answers it writes from the web carry citations and a Sources button. OpenAI offers a Chrome extension that makes ChatGPT the browser's default search engine, with a shortcut that sends a query to Google instead. Web search works on ChatGPT's Free plan and even for people who aren't signed in.

What is the best free AI search engine?

For most people, Google AI Mode: it's free, built into Google Search, and searches for every question you ask. Perplexity's free tier is a strong second for research, with numbered citations and a limited number of Pro Searches per day. ChatGPT's web search is free too, even without an account, and Copilot Search in Bing has been open to everyone since April 2025, outside Russia and China. Brave Search is free and paid for by ads.

Does Microsoft Copilot use Bing?

Yes. Microsoft's documentation for Copilot at work says it turns parts of a prompt into a short query sent to the Bing search service, then writes its answer from the results. Copilot for individuals is grounded in web search results and lists hyperlinked citations below its answers. Site owners can see how often Copilot cites their pages in the AI Performance report of Bing Webmaster Tools, in public preview since February 2026.

How can I check whether AI search engines mention my brand?

Hypervisible, the software we make, asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews the same questions every Monday, adds Perplexity and Google's AI Mode on its five-engine plans, and shows how often each one names you, in what position and next to which competitors. Its free checker gives a first reading in 5 to 10 minutes. Add Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, which report citations of your own pages in Google's AI features and in Copilot.