AI engine guides

Six AI engines, six ways of choosing suppliers

A page that ChatGPT quotes can be invisible to Perplexity. This is how the six engines that matter for international beauty sourcing find their sources — and what that means for your website.

Engine	Index / crawler	B2B AI referral share*	What matters most
ChatGPT	OAI-SearchBot; Bing reported	62.6%	Own-site category pages; Bing indexing
Claude	Claude-SearchBot	18.5%	Structured, readable pages
Gemini & AI Overviews	Googlebot	10.6% (Gemini)	Google Search eligibility
Perplexity	PerplexityBot	7.3%	Numbers in text; marketplace consistency
Microsoft Copilot	Bingbot	≈4%	Bing Webmaster Tools; IndexNow
Grok	Web + X	n/a	Consistent X presence

*Share of measurable B2B AI referrals, March–April 2026, from a published industry referral analysis. Shares shift month to month.

What our tests showed

ChatGPT cites supplier sites

In every category we tested, ChatGPT's answer linked to the suppliers' own websites — category pages, landing pages and buyer guides. Your own site is the asset.

Perplexity cites marketplaces

Perplexity's sources were dominated by Alibaba, Made-in-China, Accio, SourceReady and "top 10" roundups. Consistent marketplace profiles and fair roundups matter there.

The robots.txt baseline we recommend

Allow the search and user-fetch crawlers of every engine you want to appear in. Training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) are a separate business decision.

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /

Engine guides

ChatGPT

ChatGPT accounts for the largest share of AI referrals in B2B research.

Read the guide

Perplexity

Perplexity cites a long list of numbered sources in every answer — often more than ten.

Read the guide

Gemini & AI Overviews

Google's AI features are built on Google Search.

Read the guide

Claude

Claude has become the second-largest source of B2B AI referrals, driven by professional users.

Read the guide

Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is grounded in Bing's index and built into Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365 — the tools many corporate buyers use every day.

Read the guide

Grok

Grok, from xAI, searches the web and posts on X in real time.

Read the guide

Frequently asked questions

Which engine should we prioritise?

Start with ChatGPT (largest B2B share) and Google (AI Overviews sit on top of the searches buyers already run). The work overlaps heavily, so the others follow with little extra effort.

Do we need different content for each engine?

Mostly no. The same facts, pages and evidence serve all of them. The differences are in crawler access, indexing (Bing versus Google) and where third-party mentions come from.

Free, no obligation

See what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini say about your company — before your buyers do.

We run real buyer prompts for your category and send you the unedited answers, the suppliers being recommended instead of you, and the three fixes that matter most.

Get my free AI snapshot See pricing