People also ask
In practice
Answer engines do not share a source diet: cross-platform citation overlap between the major engines is measured in the low teens — meaning the same question cites different sources on different engines — so a placement map built for one surface underperforms on the others. The observed patterns: ChatGPT draws heavily on Reddit, YouTube and community forums — the practitioner layer where products get argued from experience; Perplexity leans on comparison and commerce surfaces — the structured lists a shopper’s engine would cite; Gemini favours established authority — institutional and reference material.
The programme consequence is a per-platform placement map: for each engine that matters to the buyer, enumerate what it currently cites for the category’s prompts, and place where the strategy fits — community presence (authentic participation, not astroturfed threads — the fake-account path is the one that ends in permanent bans), video with full transcripts on-site (the text layer is what retrieval reads), and the comparison surfaces the shopper engines cite.
The honesty rules carry into every platform: real participation under real identity, claims the product can defend, no bulk-created personas — because platforms’ detection is increasingly effective and one burned account costs the whole footprint. The measurement layer ties it together: the prompt set runs per engine, citation sources logged per surface, and the map is updated as the engines’ diets shift — because they do, and last year’s Reddit-heavy mix is not guaranteed this year’s.
See also: YouTube transcripts and AI retrieval, Prompt sets, User-generated content platforms.
Checklist: Link Building for GEO.
Related service: Brand mentions.
