Which firms each engine names
The table counts the answers that name each firm. ChatGPT gave 62 answers, Google AI Overviews 62 and Perplexity 60. It lists every firm named in at least 20 answers on at least one engine, except LoudFace, which has its own section below.
| Firm | ChatGPT (of 62) | Google AI Overviews (of 62) | Perplexity (of 60) |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Page Sage | 53 | 38 | 39 |
| iPullRank | 48 | 50 | 34 |
| Omniscient Digital | 48 | 20 | 32 |
| Siege Media | 38 | 19 | 31 |
| Directive Consulting | 16 | 26 | 29 |
| NoGood | 27 | 8 | 19 |
| WebFX | 21 | 0 | 0 |
| Animalz | 20 | 1 | 7 |
| Optimist | 4 | 25 | 7 |
| The ABM Agency | 1 | 25 | 10 |
| Rankability | 6 | 24 | 6 |
| Orainti | 8 | 23 | 7 |
Read across a row and the engines often disagree. Optimist is named in 25 of 62 Google AI Overview answers and in 4 of 62 ChatGPT answers. WebFX is named in 21 ChatGPT answers and in none from the other two. First Page Sage and iPullRank are the only two firms named in more than half the answers on every engine. iPullRank is named in 48 of 62 ChatGPT answers and 50 of 62 Google AI Overview answers. First Page Sage leads ChatGPT with 53 and Perplexity with 39, and sits second on Google AI Overviews.
Past the top two, the lists split. Optimist, The ABM Agency, Rankability and Orainti show up mostly on Google AI Overviews, in 25, 25, 24 and 23 answers, and less often on the other engines. Animalz is named in 20 ChatGPT answers, 1 Google AI Overview answer and 7 Perplexity answers. Directive Consulting is third on Google AI Overviews with 26 answers and fifth on Perplexity with 29, but tenth of all firms on ChatGPT with 16.
If you ask one engine for a shortlist, you get that engine's shortlist. Five firms in the table, First Page Sage, iPullRank, Omniscient Digital, Siege Media and Directive Consulting, are named in at least a quarter of the answers on every engine. Only First Page Sage and iPullRank are named in more than half of the answers on every engine.
Which people each engine names
A buyer who types "consultant" may want a person. The engines do not agree on which person. The table lists every person named in at least 13 answers on at least one engine.
| Person | ChatGPT (of 62) | Google AI Overviews (of 62) | Perplexity (of 60) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kevin Indig | 17 | 28 | 17 |
| Mike King | 13 | 35 | 17 |
| Aleyda Solís | 14 | 31 | 14 |
| Evan Bailyn | 17 | 17 | 10 |
| Gaetano DiNardi | 13 | 16 | 11 |
| Lily Ray | 11 | 18 | 10 |
| Nathan Gotch | 7 | 24 | 8 |
| Vincent DeCastro | 1 | 23 | 8 |
| Ross Simmonds | 13 | 1 | 5 |
Mike King leads Google AI Overviews with 35 of 62 answers. Kevin Indig and Mike King tie on Perplexity at 17 of 60. Evan Bailyn and Kevin Indig tie on ChatGPT at 17 of 62. Vincent DeCastro is named in 23 Google AI Overview answers and in 1 ChatGPT answer.
How often an engine names a person at all also differs. Individuals make up 38.5% of the firm and person names in Google AI Overview answers (245 of 636). On ChatGPT it is 24.1% (166 of 689), and on Perplexity 22.9% (126 of 551).
For some firms, such as iPullRank and First Page Sage, ChatGPT names the firm far more often than its founder. iPullRank appears in 48 ChatGPT answers and Mike King in 13. First Page Sage appears in 53 and Evan Bailyn in 17. On Google AI Overviews the first pair sits closer: iPullRank in 50 answers, Mike King in 35. It does not hold for every founder. ChatGPT names Aleyda Solís in 14 answers and Orainti, the firm she founded, in 8.
Seven of the nine people in the table are named most often on Google AI Overviews. The two exceptions are Evan Bailyn, level at 17 on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, and Ross Simmonds, named in 13 ChatGPT answers and 1 Google AI Overview answer.
Count a firm and its founder as one unit, where an answer counts once if it names either, and the two leading pairs add at most three answers to the firm's own count on any engine. First Page Sage or Evan Bailyn appears in 54 of 62 ChatGPT answers, against 53 for First Page Sage alone, and in 41 of 60 Perplexity answers, against 39. iPullRank or Mike King appears in 50 of 62 Google AI Overview answers, the same as iPullRank alone, and in 37 of 60 Perplexity answers, against 34.
What the engines read before they answer
Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite almost nothing except list or roster pages. Of the sources Google AI Overviews cited, 94.3% were listicle or roster pages (396 of 420). For Perplexity it was 96.5% (249 of 258). ChatGPT is less list-heavy at 60.7% (261 of 430).
The engines also differ in how much they pull in compared with how much they cite. ChatGPT returned 29.9 sources per answer on average and cited 6.9 of them. Perplexity returned 11.8 and cited 4.3. Google AI Overviews returned 7.0 and cited 6.8.
The most-cited domains differ as well:
- Google AI Overviews: firstpagesage.com in 39 of 62 answers, abmagency.com in 35, yesoptimist.com in 29.
- Perplexity: firstpagesage.com in 19 of 60 answers, linkedin.com in 18, eseospace.com in 15.
- ChatGPT: loudface.co in 33 of 62 answers, firstpagesage.com in 22, beomniscient.com in 19.
Google AI Overviews cited loudface.co in 2 of 62 answers, and Perplexity in none of 60.
Three roster pages, and who sits at number one
Of the consultant roster pages cited in our 184 answers, three were cited in the most answers, counting all three engines together. Each one puts a person from the publishing firm first.
- First Page Sage's top GEO consultants page, last updated 14 August 2026, ranks seven people and puts its own founder, Evan Bailyn, first.
- Rankability's best AEO consultants page, dated 6 August 2026, ranks six and puts its co-founder Nathan Gotch first. The page says Rankability is "extremely biased" towards him.
- The ABM Agency's top 5 B2B AEO and GEO consultants page, published 27 February 2026, ranks five and puts its own Vincent DeCastro first.
Google AI Overviews cited the First Page Sage page in 36 of 62 answers, The ABM Agency page in 35 and the Rankability page in 24. Perplexity cited them in 16, 12 and 12 of 60 answers. ChatGPT cited the First Page Sage page in 14 of 62 answers and the Rankability page in 1. It retrieved The ABM Agency page in 18 answers and cited it in none. Across the three engines, the First Page Sage page was cited in 66 answers, The ABM Agency page in 47 and the Rankability page in 37. The next consultant roster, on eseospace.com, was cited in 35.
Taken together, the 11 different people on the three lists account for 70.5% of person names in ChatGPT answers, 82.4% on Google AI Overviews and 85.7% on Perplexity. One list at a time, the shares are smaller. The seven people on First Page Sage's list account for 54.2% of person names in ChatGPT answers (90 of 166), 46.1% on Google AI Overviews (113 of 245) and 55.6% on Perplexity (70 of 126). The six on Rankability's list account for 41.0%, 58.4% and 56.3%. The five on The ABM Agency's list account for 34.9%, 54.3% and 53.2%.
That is overlap. It does not show that the pages produced the answers.
Does the 12 to 15 September spike change anything?
It moves the counts and some places on every engine. The leaders stay in the top three.
On 12 to 15 September all three engines retrieved more sources per answer. Perplexity retrieved 20.0 sources per answer on those days against 10.6 on the others. ChatGPT went from 27.9 to 43.3 and Google AI Overviews from 6.8 to 8.8. The sources each engine cited moved less evenly. Perplexity cited 8.3 per answer on those days against 3.7 on the others, and Google AI Overviews 8.6 against 6.5. ChatGPT cited 6.9 on both. To check whether those four days skew the picture, we re-ran every count without them.
First Page Sage still leads ChatGPT (47 of 54) and Perplexity (34 of 52), and iPullRank still leads Google AI Overviews (42 of 54). Both stay in the top three on every engine. On Perplexity, iPullRank shares second place with Omniscient Digital and Siege Media at 27.
The firms in each engine's top ten, counting ties at tenth place, are the same with and without those days. Counts fall by up to 8 answers per name. On ChatGPT, iPullRank drops from a tie for second (48) to third (41), behind Omniscient Digital (45). On Google AI Overviews, Orainti moves from seventh to a three-way tie for fourth at 21, with Optimist and The ABM Agency. Google AI Overviews still names people most often, at 38.8% against 22.5% on ChatGPT and 18.4% on Perplexity. The tables above use all days.
Where LoudFace shows up
ChatGPT names LoudFace in 22 of 62 answers: 17 of 31 for the GEO prompt and 5 of 31 for the AEO prompt. Google AI Overviews and Perplexity name it in none. ChatGPT also cited a loudface.co page in 20 of the 22 answers that name LoudFace. Without the 12 to 15 September days, ChatGPT names it in 18 of 54.
What to do with it
Do not take one engine's roster as your shortlist. Ask all three, and start with a name you can at least confirm on every engine. That is still not proof of quality.
Check the results behind any name. A name in an answer shows what the engine returned for that prompt on that day, not what the person or firm delivered for a client. Before you hire an agency from an AI answer, verify the results it claims.
Decide between a person and a firm first. The engines return both, and the two options buy different things. Our guide to an AEO consultant versus an AEO agency covers when each one wins.
If you want to be one of the names, know which pages already carry them. Most of the person names in these answers belong to people on the three roster pages above, and most of the sources Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite are list or roster pages. For B2B SaaS products rather than consultants, our walkthrough of best-of lists and comparison tables in AI answers covers the product and category lists those engines read. To check where your own brand stands across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity against your top competitors, request a free AI visibility audit.
How we counted
- Source: every answer Peec AI recorded for the two prompts from 6 September to 6 October 2026, 31 days. Both prompts returned 92 answers, 184 in total. Perplexity has 60 because it has no answers for 11 September.
- An answer is one scrape of one prompt on one engine on one day. That makes 184 answers and no buyer count.
- Named means the answer text contains the firm or person, matched against a list of 96 firms and 51 people compiled from the answers themselves. Each answer counts once per name. A mention counts whatever its role in the answer, including a firm named only as a source or as a person's employer. A firm and its founder count separately, except in the one-unit counts, which say so.
- Listicle or roster pages are identified from the words in the URL, so that share is a close estimate and no page was checked one by one.
- Cited and retrieved: a retrieved source is any source Peec recorded for the answer. A cited source is one the answer actually cites.
- The individuals-versus-firms share counts only names on that list.
- Seven answers named nobody on our list of 96 firms and 51 people: one on ChatGPT (a short preface with no list), one on Google AI Overviews (an empty answer) and five on Perplexity. Of those five, one named McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company and Boston Consulting Group, one repeated the prompt, and one said no independently verified ranking exists. The other two answered a garbled version of the AEO prompt and said they found no clear match or list: on 1 October the answer quoted the prompt with look-alike Cyrillic letters in it, and on 2 October it wrote the prompt as "Top AE0 consultants 2026", with a zero in place of the O. All seven stay in every denominator.
- Two prompts only. The counts describe what these two prompts returned. They are counts of named answers, not a market measure, and a name appearing here is not a verified result.
