There are dozens of assistants and you cannot monitor all of them. You do not need to: the useful question is not "which is biggest" but "which one do my customers open when they are about to buy". For most businesses the honest answer is three, and which three depends on your market rather than on a global chart.
Why a market-share table would be the wrong answer
Any number printed here would be stale before you finished reading it, and global share tells you almost nothing about your particular buyer. A dental clinic in Lisbon and a logistics firm in São Paulo have different answers, and neither matches the worldwide ranking. So what follows is a method, not a leaderboard.
The ones worth knowing about
| Assistant | Where its answers come from | Shows its sources? | How you influence it |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Model knowledge plus live search when the question needs it | Sometimes, with links | Be present on pages its search step can fetch |
| Gemini / AI Overviews | The Google search index | Yes, as links in the panel | Ordinary search visibility is the gate |
| Perplexity | Live retrieval, every answer | Always, numbered | The most measurable of the group |
| Copilot | Bing's index | Yes | Do not skip Bing; it is cheap and uncontested |
| Claude | Model knowledge, plus search where enabled | When searching | Same as any retrieval-based assistant |
| Regional assistants | Their own indexes | Varies | Decisive if your market is in their region |
How to pick your three
- Ask your last ten customers what they used. One sentence added to onboarding. This single question beats every published statistic, because it measures your buyers rather than the planet.
- Check which assistant your competitors appear in. If one of them names a competitor and never you, that is the one with a gap you can close.
- Include the one that shows sources. Perplexity earns a slot regardless of its share, because it tells you which pages it read. It is your instrument panel for all the others.
The thing that makes this easier than it looks
These systems overlap heavily. They draw on crawlable pages, independent references and specific, quotable text — so work done for one largely counts for the others. There is no separate optimisation per assistant, and anyone selling "ChatGPT optimisation" as a distinct service from "Perplexity optimisation" is selling the same work twice.
What does not transfer is measurement. Each one has to be checked where it lives, which is why the number of assistants you track should be the number you are willing to check monthly — three, honestly tracked, beats eight on a spreadsheet nobody updates.
When the answer is none of them
If your customers find you by walking past, by referral, or through a procurement list, assistant visibility is a side project and should be funded like one. Measure before you invest: ask ten buyers how they found you. If no one says an assistant, you have learnt something more valuable than a ranking.
