Your customers are not all asking in one place. Some ask ChatGPT because it is open on their phone all day. Some ask Perplexity because they like seeing sources. Some ask Claude mid-project. Most still ask Google, where AI Mode now answers first, the Day 11 lesson. Four engines, one set of customers, and the engines do not read the web the same way.
How each one reads
Perplexity searches the live web on nearly every question and cites as it writes. It leans hard on sources it can point at, which makes quotable pages and fresh outside signals count double.
ChatGPT mixes what it learned in training with live search when it judges the question current or local. A recommendation question about your town usually triggers the live look, and then your entity, your reviews, and your liftable passages decide what comes back.
Claude browses when the question calls for it and reads carefully when it does. Clean, consistent, plain-text pages serve it best, the Day 7 work.
Gemini sits on Google's index and the business data Google already holds, so it behaves closest to AI Mode: your profile, your reviews, and your site working as one identity.
What this means, in one sentence
The same question gets a different answer with different names in each engine, so your visibility is not one number. It is four.
The relief
Underneath the differences, all four run the same three tests this series has walked through: can the engine tell who you are, do others back you, can it quote you. One body of work feeds every engine. You do not optimize per engine. You check per engine.
The check, today
Take your main customer question from Day 6 and ask it in two engines you have not tried yet. Read the answers side by side and note the names. A business whose name repeats across engines owns the answer. A business that appears in one and not another has a gap it can now see, and every gap maps back to one of the three legs. Repeat the check monthly. These answers move, and the businesses that watch them move first.
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