AI Search
Perplexity vs Google AI Overviews: What Businesses Need to Know
A practical comparison of how Perplexity and Google AI Overviews work, who they serve, and how to optimise your brand's presence in both.
By AI Search Consultant Team
A practical comparison of how Perplexity and Google AI Overviews work, who they serve, and how to optimise your brand's presence in both.
By AI Search Consultant Team
Two of the most important AI search platforms operate quite differently. Perplexity has built a reputation as a research-grade AI search engine that cites sources. Google AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries appearing at the top of Google search results for billions of queries.
Both matter enormously for business visibility. But the strategies for appearing in each are meaningfully different.
Perplexity combines a large language model with real-time web search. When a user asks a question, Perplexity searches the web, retrieves relevant content, and synthesises an answer with inline citations.
This means Perplexity is a direct traffic driver. When your business is cited as a source in a Perplexity answer, some percentage of users will click through to your site. More importantly, being cited signals to users that Perplexity trusts your content as authoritative.
Perplexity tends to favour sources that go deep rather than broad. A thoroughly researched 2,000-word guide on a specific topic will often outperform a general overview of ten topics.
Google AI Overviews (AIOs) are generated from Google’s existing index and knowledge graph. Unlike Perplexity, they don’t always show source citations to users, though the underlying content comes from indexed web pages.
AIOs appear for a growing percentage of queries, particularly informational ones. When a business appears in an AIO, they may see increased brand awareness even without direct click-through traffic, because the AI is effectively recommending their knowledge.
A critical difference: Google AIOs are more influenced by your existing SEO health than Perplexity. Strong fundamentals, structured data, and topical authority on Google’s index all contribute.
Many businesses make the mistake of thinking about these platforms separately. In practice, a well-executed AI search strategy improves visibility across both simultaneously, because the underlying signals overlap.
Over-optimising for one platform: A strategy built only for Google’s existing SEO signals will miss Perplexity citations. A strategy that focuses only on Perplexity may neglect the foundational work that Google AIOs require.
Treating AI search like keyword search: Neither Perplexity nor Google AIOs are optimised primarily by keyword density or exact-match terms. They respond to genuine expertise, clear answers, and authoritative signals.
Ignoring structured data: Both platforms make significantly better use of your content when you tell them clearly what it’s about through schema markup.
Not tracking citations: Most businesses have no idea whether they’re being cited in AI answers. You cannot improve what you don’t measure.
If you’re new to AI search optimisation, we recommend starting with a baseline audit: understanding where your business currently appears (or doesn’t appear) in Perplexity and Google AIOs for the queries that matter most to your business.
From there, the priority actions are typically: structured content improvement, schema implementation, and external authority building.
Book a free strategy call and we’ll run this audit for you, identifying the specific queries and opportunities most relevant to your business.
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