We Tracked Brand Visibility Across 6 AI Platforms. The Results Weren't Even Close.

Summary

• Google's AI platforms tend to include brand content in their responses at a higher rate than their competitors, Stacker found in an analysis of 245 distributed stories.
• Each AI platform behaves differently, so it's important to understand their nuances when reporting on results.
• Claude was the only platform we studied where brand presence compounded over time.

Unlike SEO, optimizing for AI visibility isn't about learning what works for one platform and then going all-in. That's because each of the major platforms behaves differently: they cite different kinds of sources, provide varying numbers of citations in varying formats, and surface new information at different speeds.

They also differ in how often they cite content that was created by brands. We wanted to find out just how much they differed, so we tracked 245 stories across 6 platforms for the 4 weeks after they were distributed on the Stacker network. We found that Google’s AI platforms — especially AI Overviews and AI Mode — were the most brand-friendly environments.

Here, we'll outline how brand content is appearing across AI search and what content teams can do about it.

Methodology

To find out which AI platforms surfaced brands and their content most often, we looked at a metric called response presence rate.

Response presence rate measures whether a brand is present in a platform's response, either because the brand was mentioned by name (known as a mention), its domain was cited by the AI engine (which we call a brand citation), or a Stacker-distributed story was cited instead (called a network citation). Stacker uses Scrunch to monitor brands' AI presence.

Meeting any of these three criteria means that the brand is considered "present" in the response. It's presented as a percentage to reflect how frequently the brand appeared in all of the platform’s responses to a particular prompt.

Which AI platforms are most likely to cite brand content?

Here's how brand content performed on each of the AI platforms that we tracked.

Distribution on the Stacker network measurably expanded response presence rate for each of the platforms we tracked. Here's a breakdown of how:

Google AI Overviews: Stories saw the highest average response presence rate here (20%). That number stayed relatively consistent across the four weeks included in the analysis. Plus, 76% of analyzed stories had presence on Google AI Overviews — the highest of any of the platforms we tracked.

Google AI Mode: A close second in terms of average response presence rate at 19%, Google AI Mode tends to peak quickly and then normalize slightly lower. Our analysis found that response presence rate averaged 21% in the first week after distribution, then normalized at 18% by the fourth week. In other words, it was normal to see performance dip slightly after a hot start on this platform.

Claude: Claude starts slowly, but it grows more than any other platform. Average response presence rate increased steadily week-over-week, growing about 40% from Week 1 to Week 4. 118 of the 132 stories that had presence on Claude saw that presence grow between the first and fourth weeks after distribution.

Perplexity: This platform demonstrated the most predictability — what you see in the first week of distribution is likely what you'll continue to see in the weeks following. Growth was more modest week-over-week on Perplexity, starting at 13.1% in Week 1 and growing to 13.8% by Week 4.

Google Gemini: Similar to Perplexity, brands had fairly consistent average response presence rate in the four weeks following distribution via Stacker. Visibility here may rely primarily on existing brand authority.

ChatGPT: The AI platform with the biggest user base may also be the toughest one to crack — it had the lowest average response presence rate and the lowest number of stories with presence. But brands that can break through will get the benefit of being in front of the biggest pool of active AI users.

Why does brand content do well on Google's AI platforms?

"Good SEO is good GEO" is especially true for Google products because its AI platforms behave more like traditional search than its competitors.

Google has said that its generative AI models are built on the same ranking and quality systems that power its organic search engine. Because of this, the signals that Google has long rewarded are likely to carry over to AI Overviews and AI Mode, while other platforms like Claude and ChatGPT were built from scratch.

Stacker has seen this firsthand: Brand content that gets distributed on the Stacker network tends to perform best on Google’s AI platforms, in addition to demonstrating SEO growth. Stacker built its platform around SEO, helping distribute content that's fresh, data-backed, and educational. It turns out that those are the same qualities favored by LLMs, so it makes sense that the Stacker content that performs well in SEO is continuing to do well in Google's AI products.

What does this mean for your content strategy?

Brands creating content for the sake of AI visibility should keep these tips in mind:

• Don't optimize just for one platform — the top-performing stories had strong cross-platform presence. Stories that had an average response presence rate of over 20% (75 of the 245 stories analyzed) performed well across all of the platforms, not just one. They averaged 40%+ on Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, 36% on Claude, and 30% on Perplexity. The characteristics that drive AI visibility are the same across platforms, but presence grows at different rates and on different timelines.

• That being said, structuring your content for the most brand-friendly platforms should be a priority. Having a strong SEO play is an advantage when it comes to performing well on Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Make sure that your content includes clear answers to questions your target audience is looking for, using what you’ve already learned from your SEO practices as a guide.

• Each platform’s data should answer a different question.
• Since AI Mode spikes quickly, visibility data there should serve as an early signal but not a final score.
• Perplexity’s steady performance means it can function as a helpful baseline to understand whether changes in visibility on other platforms are a real change or just noise.
• Claude, meanwhile, is a long-term authority play — it was the only platform where authority compounded week over week. It's important not to measure your brand visibility there too soon after distribution.