A recent Linkedin post by Jim Yu flagged that BrightEdge’s AI Catalyst team analyzed citation and brand mention patterns   from prompts across Finance, Healthcare, Education, and B2B Tech in five AI search engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews. The finding that mattered most was buried in the data. Despite wildly different source preferences, every engine tends to surface the same brands. Source overlap across engine pairs runs from 16% to 59%. Brand overlap lands in a much tighter band, 35% to 55%. The engines wander far on what they cite. They hold fast to who they recommend. “Review sites, comparison content, trade press, retailer listings, and finance data are the sources AI most frequently reaches for.…