Why the platforms disagree
Each engine answers from its own mix of training data, live web access and source preferences. ChatGPT leans on what it learned in training plus browsing when it decides a question needs it. Gemini draws mainly on its training data and only pulls live Google Search results when grounding is switched on, so its view of your business is less automatically tied to your Google Business Profile than Google's AI Overviews are. Perplexity searches the live web for almost every answer and cites its sources openly, which makes it the most sensitive to what is published about you right now. The result: the same question pulls from three different evidence bases, and lands on three different shortlists. The mechanics behind how ChatGPT builds its recommendations apply broadly, but each platform runs its own version of that process with its own inputs. Google AI Overviews is a separate surface again, generated at the top of Google Search results rather than inside a chat, which is why we test it on its own.
What the differences look like in practice
Run "best physiotherapy clinic in Abu Dhabi" across the three platforms and the overlap is often just one or two names. ChatGPT often reads directory roundups and repeats their favorites, Gemini leans toward businesses with a strong Google presence and review volume, and Perplexity quotes whichever recent article compared clinics in the city. Positions differ too: the clinic named first in one answer appears last in another, or only when the question is rephrased. Arabic widens the gap further, since each platform has different depth in Arabic sources, so your Arabic-speaking customers may hear an entirely different set of recommendations than your English-speaking ones.
Why this matters for how you measure
Testing one platform tells you almost nothing about the other two, and the platform you personally prefer is probably not the only one your customers use. A restaurant owner who checks ChatGPT, sees his brand mentioned and relaxes may be invisible on Gemini, which is where many diners land through Google search. The honest picture requires running the same questions across all the major platforms, in both languages, and recording each answer separately, which is exactly the method in our guide to checking what AI says about your brand. One number per platform, tracked over time, replaces guesswork with a scoreboard.
Can you win all three?
Largely yes, because underneath the differences the platforms reward the same foundations: consistent facts everywhere your business is described, reviews on platforms engines read, presence in the directories and articles they cite, and pages that answer questions plainly. The work order differs by platform, and Perplexity responds fastest to fresh published sources while Gemini responds strongly to your Google footprint, but a fix you make for one platform is very unlikely to hurt another. That is why a proper AI visibility baseline measures all platforms before any work begins: it shows where you are weakest, which fixes will move which platform, and whether next quarter's answers actually shifted.