If your business gets mentioned by Perplexity but not ChatGPT, or the other way around, it’s not random. These tools find and use information differently, and understanding that difference helps explain what you’re seeing.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT’s answers are primarily grounded in its training data, a large snapshot of the web up to a certain point, plus live web browsing for queries where it decides current information is needed. For many business-related questions, especially anything time-sensitive, it will browse live. For general knowledge questions, it may rely more on what it learned during training, which can be months old.
Perplexity
Perplexity is built around live web search as its default behavior. It searches, reads multiple current sources, and constructs an answer with citations for nearly every query. This makes it more responsive to recent content changes than ChatGPT’s default mode, if you update a page today, Perplexity is more likely to reflect that soon.
Gemini
Gemini, being Google’s own model, is deeply integrated with Google Search and Google’s index. It tends to favor sources that already rank well in traditional Google search, which means strong traditional SEO gives you an indirect advantage with Gemini specifically, more so than with the other two.
What this means practically
You can’t optimize separately for each one in any precise way, the underlying practices (clear structure, direct answers, consistent business information, credible mentions elsewhere) help across all three. But if you’re auditing your visibility, test your business across all three tools, not just one. A gap in one doesn’t mean a gap everywhere, and a strength in one doesn’t guarantee the same in another.