How many AI platforms should you actually target?

Six platforms, and one very reasonable question

Six platforms sounds like six separate jobs, and if you read enough marketing blogs you’ll start believing you need a bespoke strategy for each one. You don’t. ChatGPT and Copilot both run on OpenAI’s models under the hood, so what helps you show up in one tends to help in the other. Gemini leans hard on Google’s own index and your Google Business Profile, which means work you’ve already done for local SEO isn’t wasted, it’s doing double duty. Perplexity behaves more like a live search engine that cites its sources, so it rewards pages with clear, quotable facts. Claude is more cautious about recommending businesses it can’t verify, which is exactly why consistency across your website, directories and reviews matters more than volume of content. The honest starting point is this: you’re not building six strategies, you’re building one solid, well-structured, consistently-described business, and letting the platforms find it in their own way. Where you focus extra effort depends on who’s actually asking about businesses like yours, not on ticking every box on a vendor’s slide.

Work out where your customers are actually asking

Before deciding which platform to prioritise, ask a more basic question: how do your customers actually go looking for someone like you? Take a dentist in Didsbury getting most new patients from “dentist near me” Google searches, that’s a very different problem to a bespoke furniture maker in the Northern Quarter whose customers are asking ChatGPT to “find me an independent furniture maker in Manchester who does custom oak pieces.” Talk to your last ten customers. Ask them straight: “How did you find us?” If three mention typing a question into ChatGPT rather than searching Google, that’s a real signal, not a guess. Check your website analytics for referral traffic from chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai or copilot.microsoft.com too, most platforms now send at least some visitors through, even if it’s a trickle. If nobody can point to a specific platform, that’s fine, it just means Google AI Overviews, built straight into ordinary search, is where you’ll get the most return for the least new effort, because it’s already sat on top of the searches you’re already getting.

The groundwork that helps everywhere at once

Here’s the good news: most of what makes you visible to one AI platform makes you visible to the others too. Structured data, the behind-the-scenes markup that tells a machine “this is a business, this is its opening hours, this is what it offers”, gets read by Google, by Copilot and increasingly by the crawlers behind ChatGPT. A Google Business Profile with accurate hours, categories and photos feeds Gemini directly and gets pulled into AI Overviews constantly. Genuine reviews on Google and Trustpilot show up as trust signals across the board, because every one of these platforms is trying to answer the same underlying question: can I trust this business enough to recommend it? So rather than thinking in terms of six separate campaigns, think in terms of one campaign with six audiences. Fix the contradictions on your own site first, an old address on one page and a new one on another, get the structured data right, and keep your review profile honest and current. That single body of work does most of the job, whichever assistant someone happens to be using.

Where it’s worth specialising, and where it isn’t

There are a couple of situations where picking a lead platform genuinely pays off. If you sell B2B services and your buyers are the sort of people who live in Perplexity for research, it’s worth making sure your case studies and pricing pages are written to be easy to cite, clear headings, real numbers, no vague waffle. If you’re a consumer brand and most enquiries already come through Google, Google AI Overviews is where your energy should go first, because it sits directly on top of demand you already have. What isn’t worth doing is spinning up separate content plans and separate “optimised for ChatGPT” landing pages for all six platforms at once. That’s expensive, it’s hard to keep consistent, and inconsistency is exactly what makes AI assistants nervous about recommending you in the first place. Pick the one or two platforms where your actual customers are asking, get the fundamentals right everywhere else as a side effect, and revisit the priority list every six months as usage shifts.