01 Surfaces
Eight engines. Eight sets of rules.
Every AI engine retrieves, weighs and cites differently. The architecture that makes you legible is shared; the last mile is not. These pages cover both.
- 8
- F2 · F3
- F4 · F5
02 At a glance
What each engine is for, and what gets you in.
GPTBotOAI-SearchBotChatGPT-User Perplexity Research-heavy comparison Source quality, freshness and how quotable the page is PerplexityBot Google AI Overviews High-intent search, at the top of the results page Index authority and structured, extractable page markup GooglebotGoogle-Extended Gemini Multi-step reasoning and follow-up questions Entity clarity held consistently across every surface Google-Extended Claude Considered comparison and drafting Consistency between sources and verifiable claims ClaudeBotClaude-UserClaude-SearchBot Copilot Questions asked inside the tools people already work in Bing index coverage and crawler access Bingbot Grok Real-time web analysis and current events Recency, source diversity and X platform integration GrokBot DeepSeek Deep reasoning and complex analysis tasks Evidence quality, logical consistency and training data depth DeepSeekBot Our robots.txt allows every crawler, these included. If yours does not, that is usually the cheapest visibility fix available to you.
03 Why it differs
One architecture, eight emphases.
The same entity graph feeds all eight engines. What changes is which signal each one leans on hardest when it decides whom to name.
Perplexity and Copilot lean on what they can fetch and quote right now, so crawlability, freshness and quotable structure dominate.
ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude also draw on what the model already absorbed, so consistency across the whole web matters more than any single page.
Google AI Overviews sits on the classic index, so structured markup and established authority still carry most of the weight.
04 Answers
About the engines.
How many AI platforms should we optimize for?
All eight, because users spread their questions across them and the foundational work is shared. Entity clarity and extractable content improve every engine at once; only the last mile is platform-specific.
Are AI engines replacing search?
They are absorbing the part of search where someone wanted a conclusion rather than a list. Navigational and transactional search is largely unchanged, which is why both surfaces still matter.
Does blocking AI crawlers protect our content?
It removes you from the answer instead. If an engine cannot crawl you, it will describe your category using whoever it can crawl, usually a competitor or an aggregator.
How does one method cover eight different engines?
Because the F1–F5 work targets what all of them share: unambiguous entities, verifiable claims, extractable content and corroborating sources. Platform differences change the emphasis, not the architecture.
05 The first move
Find out how eight AI engines describe you.
The free AI Visibility Audit reports what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek say about your brand today, and where the gaps are.
- Platform-by-platform visibility snapshot
- Entity clarity assessment
- Competitor comparison
- Prioritized actions