Checking citations: Perplexity vs Google AI Overviews disagree on who's authoritative

Checking citations: Perplexity vs Google AI Overviews disagree on who's authoritative

Question: when you audit which sources an AI engine trusts for your topic, do Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name the same sites?

Evidence: I logged cited sources for 30 mid-tail queries in one niche across both engines. Source overlap was 41%. Perplexity leaned harder on Reddit, forums, and recent posts; AI Overviews favored established domains and Wikipedia-class references. Brand mentions in third-party listicles correlated with citation in both, but the effect was stronger for Overviews.

Nuance: optimizing for one engine's citation logic doesn't transfer cleanly. If your audience uses Perplexity, community presence matters more than you'd guess from Google-centric advice.

Method note: 30 queries, citations recorded by hand same week, deduplicated by root domain.

Caveat: engines re-rank constantly; this is a snapshot, and 30 queries is a small sample.

Confidence: low