News & research notes
Index updates, engine-behavior notes and methodology changes. Each edition is dated and versioned.
Among the twelve tracked categories, AI coding assistants produce the least consistent answers across engines: a tool can lead on one assistant and be absent from another for the same prompt. The pattern points to fast-moving, web-sourced reputation that some engines pick up faster than others.
We rebalanced how breadth of citation across engines contributes to the composite score, so that a brand cited by all four engines is rewarded more distinctly than one carried by a single model. Full edition back-filled under the new weighting.
Legal, health and finance copilots have crossed the threshold of buyer-intent search volume on AI assistants to warrant their own leaderboard. The category enters with high movement and low average coverage — a young, contested space.
Perplexity's live web grounding surfaces brands with strong recent third-party coverage that training-based models can lag on. The result is systematic divergence: our by-engine view exists precisely to make this visible rather than averaging it away.
The largest upward movement this month clustered in cloud and DevOps tooling, where independent benchmark and comparison content appears to be translating into citation faster than in more established categories.
Gemini showed higher run-to-run variance than the other engines in our sampling. We doubled its sampling frequency to stabilise monthly scores; consistency readings for Gemini-heavy brands are now more reliable.
Across the index, the share of capable-but-uncited brands is highest in cybersecurity and compliance-adjacent categories — fields where buyers increasingly ask AI assistants first, yet where many vendors remain absent from the answer.
We added a fifth dimension measuring the independence and quality of the sources engines rely on to cite a brand. Citation grounded in editorially independent sources now scores above self-referential citation — a structural signal of durable visibility.