By pressat
Publication Date: 2026-08-20 00:00:00
New Study: AI Assistants Can’t Agree Which UK Businesses to Recommend — ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini Cited 104 Different Sources Across Just 30 Answers
Logged study finds each AI assistant picks recommendations a different way — meaning UK businesses can be highly visible on one assistant and invisible on another
MANCHESTER, UNITED KINGDOM — 21 August 2026 — When UK buyers ask AI assistants who to hire, the assistants can’t agree on the answer. A newly published study that logged first answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini to ten fixed buyer questions found the three assistants cited 104 different web sources across just 30 answers — with only eleven sources cited more than once, and only three businesses recommended by all three assistants.
The study, conducted on 19–20 August 2026 by Manchester-based AI visibility agency The Happy Cat, asked each assistant identical questions a real buyer might pose — including “best AI visibility agency UK” and “AI SEO agency Manchester” — recording the first answer verbatim, with every response screenshotted and published.
Its central finding: each AI assistant chooses recommendations in a fundamentally different way.
- ChatGPT recommended businesses from their own websites — every source it cited carried a tracking tag, utm_source=chatgpt.com, ChatGPT literally labelling its own referral traffic. Businesses whose sites block AI crawlers, or never state plainly what they do, cannot…
