How to Optimize for Google AI Overviews vs. Perplexity vs. ChatGPT

The instinct to treat AI search optimization as a single unified discipline is understandable but wrong. Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT are not the same product with different interfaces. They have different retrieval infrastructure, different source preferences, different citation behaviors, and different user contexts that shape what gets surfaced and how. Optimizing for all three with identical tactics produces results that are mediocre across all three rather than strong on any of them. Here's how each platform actually works and what platform-specific optimization looks like in practice.