ChatGPT and Gemini disagree in one category out of three
And saying "I'm a freelancer" moves one brand from 34% of answers to 90%.
Ask ChatGPT for the best tool in your category. Then ask Gemini. You have a 1-in-3 chance of getting two different companies. GetIntel put roughly 80 buyer-phrased questions into each of 126 software categories through live consumer apps rather than developer APIs, and kept 9,978 usable answers covering 1,825 brands. All collected on 6 August.
The disagreement is the headline. What sits under it is worse. Saying who you are moves the answer: in some categories a brand goes from winning 34% of answers to 90%, and the only change is whether the buyer says "I'm a freelancer" or "we're an enterprise". Phrasing it as a British buyer flips the number one in about half the categories they could measure. Showing up is not winning either. HubSpot appears on 19 leaderboards and wins three. Salesforce appears on 13 and wins none.
Caveats, because they matter here. One day of data, two engines, no error bars, no peer review, and "top pick" only means the first brand named. GetIntel sells AI visibility software, so the conclusion is also the pitch. TheNextWeb said so, and so do we.
Your category has a leaderboard now, and four different buyers are reading four different versions.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst at Sonata Insights, on what changed for Stanley:
"Now, brands like Stanley are recognizing that they need to think of
AI platforms as a different type of influencer. They are becoming
important places where consumers discover new brands, learn about them
and then make purchase decisions."
The same roles human influencers play, in her words. There is a budget line implied in that sentence, and nobody wants to be the first to say it in front of the influencer team.
NUMBERS MATTER
303%. Growth in ChatGPT referral visits to B2B websites, from roughly 645,000 a month in June 2025 to 2.6 million in June 2026, measured across 11 billion visits by Demandbase Labs through 31 July. Perplexity referrals fell over the same period. Gemini and Claude were flat.
"AI traffic" is one company's traffic. Build the plan on that, not on the category.
DAILY PROMPT
Act as a buyer in [CATEGORY], not as my brand. Ask four versions of the same purchase question in both ChatGPT and Gemini, in fresh sessions with memory off: the plain version, the version where I say I am a freelancer, the version where I say we are a 2,000-person enterprise, and the version phrased the way a British buyer would phrase it. For every answer, record the first brand named, every other brand named, and every source cited. Then tell me which of those four buyers we lose, and which websites are deciding it.
Use it before you renew a visibility subscription. Twenty minutes of asking it yourself gets you the thing the dashboard will not: the handful of sites your category is actually being decided on.
The work that quietly kills a lean marketing team isn’t strategy — it’s the inbox triage, the follow-up nobody sent, the LinkedIn post that didn’t go out because Tuesday happened.
Marblism gives you named AI employees for each of those jobs: Eva on email, Penny on content and SEO, Sonny on social, Stan on outbound, Rachel on calls — described once, then running in the background without prompts or setup work.
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CMO CORNER
When in doubt, simplify the system before adding supervision.
After a study like this, the instinct is to buy a fourth monitoring tool. The cheaper move is to cut the number of places your product information lives. Most brands have four versions of the same spec across a product page, a sales sheet, a partner portal and a help center, each out of date in a different direction. The assistants read all four and average you.
We provide CMOs with AI strategy consulting for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.
If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.
TOOL UPGRADE
Today's finding is that the question changes the answer. Three for working the question rather than the brand:
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LEARN THIS
If today landed, the follow-on is the course: AI SEO Mastery: Get CITED.
It works the citation problem specifically, getting named and linked inside an AI answer rather than ranking a page and hoping the summary is kind. It takes longer than a subscription, and it is the half of this you can control. Free.
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BRAND SLOP
Kinney Drugs named its AI phone assistant Burt, after the pharmacy's founder. Nice touch. From May, it handled patient calls about prescriptions and refills, and customers reported incoherent calls, wrong dosages, and missed prescription notifications.
The consent mechanism is the part to sit with. Anyone who had ever given the pharmacy a phone number was automatically consented into the AI under its terms. One customer described approving the refills it called about by reflex, then receiving medication she did not need.
Inbound calls are back on touch-tone. Burt keeps the outbound refill texts, opt-in now. Dave Bellini, customer: "They should have never gone to robots. Most
of their customers are old, or they got an illness."
President John Marraffa defended the tool's HIPAA compliance, then said the sentence almost nobody says: getting privacy and security right does not mean they got the experience right, and they own that.
Go and read what your own terms consented your customers to. Somebody wrote that paragraph years ago for a mailing list, and it is now the legal basis for a robot phoning your most fragile segment at dinner time.
That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
