Four AI Platforms, Three Categories, One Uncomfortable Truth: There is No One Strategy to Show Up Across AI Searches

There's a question we keep getting from brand teams lately, and it goes something like this: "We've optimized for search for years. Can the same strategy work for AI?"

The short answer is no. The longer answer — the one that actually changes how you think about brand visibility — is what this piece is about.

Over the past few months, we've been running structured queries across four AI platforms — Grok, Gemini, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity — across three consumer categories: credit cards, running shoes, and smartphones. For each, we tracked not just which brands showed up, but which sources the AI cited when it answered.

What we found is that AI search engines operate on fundamentally different source logics, citation philosophies, and content preferences. If your brand is visible on one, that's no guarantee you're visible on any of the others. Unlike SEO today, a one-size-fits-all strategy simply doesn’t work.

Here’s what the data actually shows.

The setup: three categories, four platforms, thousands of citations

Across the three categories, we tracked a combined 896 AI responses and roughly 19,000+ citations. Each category had a distinct prompt set covering major consumer intents within that vertical — comparison queries, discovery queries, experience and complaint queries, feature-specific queries, and emerging trend queries.

• Each prompt was generated using real customer conversations from social channels.
• The platforms covered were Grok, Gemini, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity.
• The goal wasn't to rank brands. It was to map the citation ecosystem: which domains AI tools trust enough to cite, how that varies by platform, and what that divergence means practically.

1. Credit card category: The comparison aggregator economy

The credit card category generated 4,460 citations across 230 responses on Sprinklr LLM Insights — the smallest citation volume of the three categories, which reflects something interesting about how AI handles financial content. The dominant sources were not blogs or community forums. They were comparison aggregators.

Bankrate led the category overall with 89 response appearances.

It was followed by:

• Reddit (86),
• NerdWallet (77),
• Experian (72), and
• CNBC (64)

The pattern is immediately legible: when someone asks AI about credit cards, it reaches for the same institutional authority sources that have dominated personal finance SEO for a decade. Bankrate, NerdWallet, The Points Guy, WalletHub, and US News are the established citation stack for this vertical.

At the platform level, things diverge significantly for the credit card category

• Grok generated the most citations by far in this category — over 2,500 citations — and its source list was dominated by Reddit (133 citations), YouTube (125), NerdWallet (123), CNBC (104), and Bankrate (98). Grok in financial services is reading community discussion at scale: real cardholder conversations, video breakdowns, and editorial comparisons together. It's the broadest, evidence-focused base of any platform.

• Perplexity operates at the opposite extreme. With fewer than 460 total citations across the same 46 prompts, it is aggressively selective. Its top two sources — Reddit (33) and Bankrate (31) — account for the bulk of its citation footprint. Perplexity is making a deliberate editorial bet: community experience first, then the single most authoritative comparison aggregator.

• Google AI Overview led with CNBC (61 citations), followed by Bankrate (46) and Reddit (46). The CNBC leadership is notable — it reflects Google's weighting of mainstream media authority, the kind of source it has trusted in its own search results for years. Experian (39) and YouTube (32) follow, then WalletHub, NerdWallet, and a cluster of institutional sources. Google AIO's financial services citation profile is the most mainstream media-focused, compared to any other platform.

• Gemini showed a preference for specialist and consumer-advisory sources: NerdWallet (19), The Motley Fool (17), Experian (15), Bankrate (14), Forbes (11), and Upgraded Points (11). Compared to Grok's breadth, Gemini's list reads like a curated shortlist — fewer sources, more specialist-advisory in character.

The strategic read for credit card brands: you need to be in Bankrate, NerdWallet, and Reddit — they're the universal stack that crosses platform boundaries. But beyond that, a presence in CNBC gets you into Google AIO's citation ecosystem specifically, while YouTube channel credibility gets you into Grok's. Those are different content investments that serve different AI audiences.

2. Running shoe category: When video and community become the evidence base

The running shoe category generated 8,460 citations across 420 responses — nearly double the credit card volume — and the source profile shifted dramatically.

The most-cited domain is YouTube (158 response appearances, 735 citations), followed by:

• Reddit at 145 responses and 550 citations
• runrepeat.com, appeared 144 times — a specialist aggregator with almost no parallel in the financial services dataset

The running category tells a different story about how AI establishes credibility. For the credit card category, the evidence base is primarily editorial and institutional: aggregators, comparison tables, consumer finance publishers. For running shoes, however, the evidence base is experiential and community-driven:

• video reviews,
• user-generated comparisons,
• runner forums, and
• retailer content

Fleet Feet (94 appearances), Doctors of Running (47), The Run Testers (47), and Believe in the Run (40) are all specialty publisher or community sources with negligible presence outside the running world.

The divergence by platform is even more pronounced in the running shoe category

• Grok is dominant. It generated over 5,260 citations on its own — more than 60% of the total. Its source list: YouTube (519), Reddit (422), RunRepeat (295), Runner's World (217), Facebook (199), Fleet Feet (137). Grok, in the running shoes context, is essentially a synthesizer of the entire video-first, community-first running content ecosystem. YouTube and Reddit together account for roughly 18% of all citations in the running category — and almost all of that is Grok.

• Google AI Overview showed its most distinctive behavior of any category in this dataset. Its #1 citation source was google.com itself — 408 citations. YouTube followed at 184, RunRepeat at 154, nike.com at 64, and Instagram at 48. The self-referential google.com citation is a pattern we can recognize: GAO has a tendency to surface its own properties and adjacent ecosystem content. And in a visual-search-heavy category like footwear, YouTube and social platforms also take on disproportionate weight.

• Perplexity, true to form, was the most editorially selective. Its top sources were Reddit (89), Runner's World (36), RunRepeat (33), and YouTube (31) — a tight four-source hierarchy that it maintained consistently across prompts. Perplexity treated runner community discussion and two specialist publications as the sufficient evidence base for this category.

• Gemini leaned into niche specialist sources: RunRepeat (31), Fleet Feet (23), Run and Become (9), Still I Run (9), Run Weekly (8). These are sources that a passionate runner would trust but carry little weight outside the category. Gemini's citation preferences in running shoes look like they were built by someone with specific knowledge of the running community.

The key insight for running shoe brands is that the citation ecosystem is fundamentally experiential — and being present in RunRepeat, Runner's World, and Fleet Feet as editorial citations is table stakes, not a differentiator. The real leverage is in YouTube review content and Reddit community discussion.

There's also a specialist content opportunity that the URL-level data makes clear. The most-cited specific URLs were gear guides like Outdoor Gear Lab's best running shoes roundup (56 citation count from 32 responses), Runner's World's best-running-shoes guide (67 citations from 32 responses), and RunRepeat's best running shoes guide (49 from 26). These comprehensive, regularly updated roundups are the single highest-leverage citation targets in the category.

3. Smartphone category: Four platforms, four completely different worlds

The smartphone category is the most complex and, analytically, the most interesting of the three. It generated 6,360 citations across 246 responses.

The top-level source landscape has one clear constant: YouTube leads (115 response appearances), followed closely by Reddit (114 responses, 392 citations). Next in the list are:

• PCMag was the leading specialist publisher (67 responses, 146 citations)
• PhoneArena (66),
• Tom's Guide (59),
• TechRadar (57), and
• CNET (51)

The category features 1,302 unique citation domains — more than double the source diversity of running shoes — reflecting the sheer scale and fragmentation of the global tech media landscape.

The platform-level breakdown is where the smartphone category becomes unprecedented in its divergence

• Grok generated roughly 47 citations per response — nearly double Google AI Overview's average, and over six times Perplexity's. Its source hierarchy: YouTube (589 citations), Reddit (281), Facebook (120), PCMag (112), CNET (93). Facebook community groups cracking the top three is something we only observed in this category on this platform — it reflects both Grok's social content appetite and the density of tech-discussion communities on Facebook. For smartphone brands, Grok creates a unique imperative: you need a YouTube presence, a Reddit standing, and a Facebook community footprint — simultaneously, and across fundamentally different content formats.

• Google AI Overview placed google.com as its top citation source (290 citations) — its own properties, its own ecosystem. YouTube followed at 137, then Reddit at 42, Vertu at 29, and PCMag at 18. The Vertu appearance is the most puzzling data point in this entire dataset: a luxury phone brand with marginal market share showing up as a top-5 citation domain on GAO. Our read is that Vertu's content — which covers the premium/ultra-premium segment in detail — is being surfaced when premium-segment prompts are run, and GAO's broader domain sweep picks it up at higher volume than the other platforms.

• Perplexity maintained its signature selectivity. Its top five sources are Reddit (58), YouTube (37), play.google.com (12), Alibaba (10), TechRadar (9). The Google Play Store appearing in Perplexity's top 3 is something we didn't see in other categories. It suggests that Perplexity is treating this app marketplace’s ratings and user reviews as legitimate citation evidence for smartphone quality, which is genuinely novel and has implications for brands managing their Play Store presence and rating profiles.

• Gemini generated fewer than two citations per response. Its top sources — Tech Advisor (5 citations), Android Authority, eu.redmagic.gg, support.apple.com — are each cited only a handful of times across the entire analysis period. Influencing Gemini's brand narrative in this category requires a fundamentally different strategy: ensuring accurate, structured, detailed brand coverage in the publications that form its training corpus — Android Authority, TechRadar, The Verge, CNET — rather than chasing citation placements.

The patterns that hold true across all three categories

After running this analysis across three product categories, certain structural patterns have become consistent enough that we'd treat them as durable findings rather than category-specific nuances.

• Reddit and YouTube are universally cited. In every category, these two domains are among the top five external citations across every platform. The specific subreddits change — r/personalfinance differs from r/running which differs from r/android — but the structural role of Reddit as a community-evidence source and YouTube as a video-evidence source holds regardless of vertical. Any brand that doesn't have a meaningful presence in both channels is building on a fragile foundation for AI visibility.
• Grok is the citation volume engine. Across all three categories, Grok generated more citations than any other platform and by a significant margin. In running shoes, it accounted for over 60% of total citations. Its citation behavior means that Grok visibility strongly correlates with YouTube and Reddit presence — because those are the sources it reaches for at scale.
• Perplexity is the editorial editor. In every category, Perplexity maintained a tight, selective citation stack of 4-6 sources that it returned to consistently. If you are looking for visibility across Perplexity, you need to be in its chosen sources for your category — and that set is small enough to identify and target.
• Gemini doesn't cite; it synthesizes. Across all three categories, Gemini generated near-zero external citations. This is the most consistent behavioral pattern in the entire dataset. It has direct strategic implications: Gemini is not a citation-optimization problem. It's a training-data and brand authority problem.
• Google AI Overview self-references google.com. In running shoes, it cited google.com 408 times; in smartphones it cited google.com 290 times. This ecosystem-first behavior shapes what brands need to do to win on GAO: presence in YouTube (a Google property), structured data that Google's own crawlers index cleanly, and engagement in Google's product and review ecosystems. This also means that Google SEO still holds plenty of meaning and weight.

Related Read: How AI Decides Which Brands Get Found (and Which Ones Get Skipped)

How this citation analysis shapes brand strategy

The framing we keep coming back to is this: there is no such thing as "AI search visibility" as a single, unified strategy. There are as many AI search visibility problems as there are platforms — and they require different content investments, different distribution strategies, and different measurement approaches.

The three categories we analyzed — credit cards, running shoes, and smartphones — also illustrate something about how the AI citation ecosystem maps to consumer intent.

• In financial services, the evidence base is institutional and comparative
• In running shoes, it's experiential and community-driven
• In smartphones, it's the most fragmented and socially distributed of the three

The category shapes which types of content earn citations, which means brands need to double down on the content characteristics of their vertical rather than borrow heavily from a generic AEO playbook.

The citation layer is where AI recommendation authority is actually built. Understanding it — by platform, by category, by prompt intent — is the new competitive intelligence challenge. And the brands that map it earliest will have a structural advantage that compounds as AI search volumes continue to soar.

Explore how Sprinklr’s LLM Insights can help your brands scale AEO with prompts based on real customer conversations and built-in actionability.