A site can rank at the top of Yandex and Google but still get no citations from AI assistants. The reason: assistants pull data from search engines SEO teams rarely track.
Peec reviewed 100 pages cited by Claude. 89 appeared in Brave's top 20. Nearly nine out of ten references came from a search engine that seldom makes it into promotion reports.
Each assistant uses a different search provider
ChatGPT, Claude and Alisa AI rely on different result suppliers. Checking rankings only in Yandex or Google gives an incomplete picture.
If a brand wants to appear in a specific assistant's answers, it needs to monitor the search engine that assistant integrates with. For Claude that is Brave, for ChatGPT it is Bing, for Alisa AI most likely Yandex.
Why it matters for SEO and content strategy
Traffic from AI assistants is growing. Users increasingly ask assistants instead of traditional search engines. If a site does not appear in Claude or ChatGPT sources, it loses that audience — even with strong rankings in major systems.
Checking Brave or Bing results adds work, but without it there is no way to know whether an assistant will see a brand's content. Yandex rankings remain important for direct traffic, but they are not enough for assistant answers.
What to do
Add Brave and Bing rank checks to regular SEO reports — where AI assistants look for information. If a site is not indexed by these engines or ranks low, find out why: technical errors, weak backlinks or insufficient relevant content.
Brave and Bing algorithms differ from Yandex. What works in one system may not work in another. Optimising for AI assistants cannot be reduced to copying strategies for traditional search engines.
