Ask AI for similar websites, then check where the answer came from

Ask AI for similar websites and you get a confident, tidy list in seconds. Ask again and the list changes. That is not a bug to work around but the main thing to understand about using ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini for this job: each answer is a sample. Treated that way, AI assistants are one of the better tools for finding sites like a given competitor. Treated as an oracle, they mislead.

Why assistants are good at this

Language models learn which brands belong together from the same material buyers read: comparison articles, "alternatives to" roundups, forum threads, review summaries. When you ask what is similar to a product, the model is drawing on that body of co-mentions. Assistants that search the web, such as Perplexity and ChatGPT with search on, go further and pull current comparison pages into the answer.

That makes them strong at one meaning of "similar": the brands people put side by side. They are weaker at another: which domains compete for the same Google searches. For that you need keyword data, covered further down.

How to prompt

Keep it plain and give context the model can use.

• "What are the main alternatives to [site]?"
• "Which sites are like [site] for a five-person team?"
• "If someone uses [site] and wants something cheaper, what do they look at?"

Run each prompt in more than one assistant, and run it more than once in each. Write every brand into a sheet with a tick per appearance. After three or four runs per assistant, the pattern is clear: some names show up every time, some once. The consistent ones are the peers the models agree on. The one-offs are guesses, sometimes for products that no longer exist.

Read the sources, not just the names

When an answer cites pages, open them. Those citations show where the model got its idea of the group. Often it is a handful of roundups that keep appearing. Those pages are worth knowing for two reasons: they define the category for AI answers, and they are the places a brand would want to be mentioned.

To see citations across many questions rather than one, seogeoaeo.ai's AI Citation Finder lists the 25 pages cited in the most Google AI Overview and ChatGPT answers for a topic, with the sites cited most. It costs 160 credits per run and does not cover Perplexity or Gemini. It tracks the commonly asked questions, and far fewer on ChatGPT than on Google, so read its counts as comparisons.

Turn the sampling into a measurement

Doing the repeat-and-tally by hand works but takes time. AI Answer Visibility on seogeoaeo.ai asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini one question with web search on and reports, for each, whether your brand is named, where it ranks among the brands named, whether your site is cited, and which brands and sites are recommended instead. That last part is a list of similar sites as AI answers see them. It costs 120 credits. Each run is a sample, so run it more than once on questions that matter, and note that it does not track answers over time.

Where AI answers fall short

Assistants do not know which domains share Google rankings. A recipe blog can take a large share of a meal kit brand's search traffic and never be named by a chatbot as similar, because no buyer would compare them. For that kind of similarity, use a keyword overlap lookup.

seogeoaeo.ai's Competitor Finder does that for 38 credits: enter any public domain and a Google country, and it returns up to 30 sites sharing the most ranking keywords, with sites where 5% or more of their keywords overlap marked as close competitors and very large general sites kept apart. Its figures are estimates and it sees only Google search.

A combined workflow

1. Ask three assistants the same question, several times each, and keep the brands that repeat.
2. Open the pages they cite and note which roundups keep coming up.
3. Run the competitor's domain through a keyword overlap lookup to add the search rivals the assistants missed.
4. Compare the lists. Brands on both are core peers.

Plans on seogeoaeo.ai start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits, and every tool shows its price before it runs. It does one-off checks rather than tracking; for daily rank movement, a suite with a rank tracker fits better.

Start by asking the question twice. If the answers disagree, you have learned the most important thing about AI-generated lists already. Then check the sources and the search data before you act on them.