By Greg Jarboe
Publication Date: 2026-09-09 19:00:00
In a recent LinkedIn post, Ross Hudgens, CEO of Siege Media, argued that Perplexity’s market share is shrinking. So, including it alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google’s AI search products can give marketers a distorted picture of where their visibility actually matters. Ross declared, “Everyone should remove Perplexity from their LLM trackers today.”
I think Hudgens is asking the right question. I am less convinced that he has the right answer.
The AI search market is clearly concentrating around a handful of major platforms. But it has not reached the point where SEO professionals can confidently focus on the “four major models” and stop looking elsewhere.
In fact, the data suggests we may be heading toward a three-tier market rather than a settled leaderboard.
I’ve Seen This Movie Before
This argument triggered a flashback for me.
In March 2002, I attended Search Engine Strategies in Boston. The dot-com crash was still fresh, and I was working for an SEO agency in Greater Boston that tracked our clients’ rankings across 15 different search engines.
Someone at the conference argued that we should simplify our reporting and concentrate on the five major search engines of the day, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves.
I pointed out that Google was missing from the list.
That turned out to be an important omission. Google was gaining search share rapidly, even though it was not yet one of the…
