On 11 August 2026 we asked ChatGPT and Perplexity the same buying questions about 92 SaaS products and kept every source they cited. That produced 552 answers carrying 6,623 citations to 1,992 different domains, which is enough to say something about where these systems get their answers from, even though it is not enough to say anything about the 92 brands themselves. The second half of that sentence matters and the method explains why, so the method comes first.

How it was run

92 SaaS products across categories including project management, form builders, applicant tracking, privacy analytics, email marketing, no code databases and accounting.

Each product got three prompts. Two of them describe a buying situation without naming anyone, and the third names the product directly, which is a control rather than part of any result. Both engines received every prompt, in one run, on 11 August 2026. That is 552 answers with no failed calls.

Citations were taken from the source lists the engines return alongside their answers, not inferred from the text of the answer. Domain counts are per citation, so a page cited twice in one answer is counted twice.

Two properties of that design decide what the numbers below can carry. Both engines saw an identical prompt for a given product, which makes any comparison between the engines fair. But the prompts themselves were generated from each product's own website, which means two products were measured with two different instruments, and no comparison between products survives that. Everything below is the first kind. The last section is about the second kind, and about what we changed.

The two engines are reading different internets

ChatGPT drew on 349 distinct domains across its 276 answers. Perplexity drew on 1,820 across the same number. They had 177 domains in common, which is 8.9 percent of everything either of them touched.

That difference shows up in what they reach for first:

	ChatGPT	Perplexity
1	reddit.com (585)	reddit.com (362)
2	wikipedia.org (130)	g2.com (142)
3	g2.com (18)	zapier.com (62)
4	matomo.org (14)	capterra.com (59)
5	capterra.com (12)	trustpilot.com (40)

ChatGPT leans on Reddit and Wikipedia and then falls off a cliff: its third most cited domain appears 18 times against Wikipedia's 130. Perplexity spreads much wider and pulls heavily from review sites, with G2 alone appearing 142 times against ChatGPT's 18.

Downstream of that, the two agreed on which brands to name in 59.2 percent of cases and on which source to cite in 4.3 percent. Optimising for one of them tells you very little about the other.

Citations are not concentrated

The intuition that a handful of big domains own AI answers turns out to be wrong, at least in this sample.

Reddit is the single largest source and it accounts for 14.3 percent of all citations. The top ten domains together reach 24 percent. You have to go to the top one hundred domains before you pass 46 percent, which means more than half of every citation in the dataset comes from somewhere further down than that.

And 1,241 domains were cited exactly once. That is 62 percent of all the domains involved, each appearing a single time across 552 answers.

Sorted by kind, it comes out like this:

Type of source	Share of citations
Blogs, media and vendor sites	76.7%
Reddit	14.3%
Review sites (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot)	5.3%
Wikipedia	2.0%
Social platforms	1.1%
GitHub	0.7%

Three quarters of the ground is ordinary web pages rather than the platforms people worry about.

Your own site is one voice in twelve

Each answer carried twelve citations on average. The brand's own website appeared in 35.3 percent of the answers written about it, and across the whole dataset it accounted for 6.4 percent of citations.

So the product's own site does get read. It simply is not what the answer is made of. Eleven of the twelve sources behind a typical answer belong to somebody else, which is an uncomfortable arithmetic for anyone whose plan for AI visibility begins and ends with their own pages.

Where Reddit actually happens

Since Reddit is the largest single domain, it is worth knowing where in Reddit. The 947 citations landed here:

Subreddit	Citations
r/saas	74
r/smallbusiness	56
r/selfhosted	37
r/emailmarketing	37
r/webdev	28
r/nocode	26
r/recruiting	22
r/productmanagement	20
r/airtable	20
r/projectmanagement	19

Note how ordinary that list is. These are not growth communities or marketing subreddits, they are places where people using the software talk to each other about using it.

The results we are not publishing

We measured 92 brands and we are saying nothing about any of them individually. That is the more useful half of this exercise, so here is the reasoning in full.

Generating each brand's questions from its own website was a mistake, and the consequence is the one flagged in the method: two brands measured two ways cannot be ranked against each other, and a category average built from those scores inherits the same fault. We have since moved to one frozen question set per category, asked of every brand in it, which is the only arrangement under which comparison means anything.

The sample was also too thin to call anything absent. Two unaided prompts across two engines at one run leaves four observations per brand. Thirteen brands appeared in none of their four. That reads like a finding until you do the arithmetic: a zero out of four leaves a 95 percent interval running to 65.8 percent, so a brand that never came up could genuinely be named in two answers out of three. Our own scorecards stored that upper bound directly beside the zero, under a label reading "invisible".

Twelve distinct questions is where that stops being true. At twelve the same interval closes to 24.3 percent, which is narrow enough to tell a company it does not come up. Below twelve it is not, and the gap between four questions and twelve is the difference between a number and an opinion with a decimal point.

None of that touches the sections above, because none of them compares one brand to another. Where each engine looks, how far the two overlap, how concentrated the sources are and how often a vendor's own site appears are all properties of the answers themselves, and they hold whether or not the questions suited any particular company.

If you want this reading for your own brand, the free check runs live questions and prints the interval next to the number rather than under it.