Do ChatGPT and Gemini recommend the same marketing agencies, six US verticals measured

Six buyer questions, one per vertical, put to ChatGPT and Gemini on the same night. The two engines named 51 different marketing agencies and agreed on 8 of them. Then we opened the vendor pages behind 32 of the price claims in those answers: 14 firms publish the figure, 11 publish nothing on a page that loaded, and 7 served a 403, a 404, a redirect to a contact form or a 202 with an empty body. If you are choosing an agency on what an assistant told you, that is the shape of the ground under the answer.

What was measured

One question per vertical, in the form a buyer types, with no vendor named and our own company never named: the best marketing agency for a dental practice, for an HVAC or home services company, for a law firm, for a real estate business, for a SaaS company, and for an ecommerce brand. Each was put to the ChatGPT and Gemini product surfaces through a data provider on 21 October 2026 between 22:19 and 22:38 UTC. Vendor pages were fetched and read on 22 October 2026, and every figure below is attached to the URL it was read on.

Vertical	Named by ChatGPT	Named by Gemini	On both lists	Citations returned
Dental practice	4	9	1	ChatGPT 24, Gemini 0
HVAC and home services	4	5	2	ChatGPT 78, Gemini 3
Law firm	5	4	1	ChatGPT 23, Gemini 2
Real estate	4	4	1	ChatGPT 28, Gemini 3
SaaS	5	6	2	ChatGPT 27, Gemini 3
Ecommerce	4	5	1	ChatGPT 28, Gemini 2
Six verticals	26	33	8	ChatGPT 208, Gemini 13

Fifty one distinct firms, 8 named by both engines, 43 named by one engine only. The eight that both engines put in front of a buyer were Pain-Free Dental Marketing, Hook Agency, RYNO Strategic Solutions, Grow Law, Luxury Presence, Kalungi, Directive Consulting and Common Thread Collective. In five of the six verticals the engines agreed on exactly one name.

Finding one, the two engines are not reading the same market

ChatGPT returned 208 citations across the six answers and Gemini returned 13. On the dental question Gemini ran no live search at all and still produced nine names with a price range against each, several of them labelled as industry benchmarks rather than published rates.

That is the practical difference for anybody trying to be recommended. One engine is assembling an answer out of pages it fetched that minute, so the pages decide the answer. The other leaned on what it already held for at least one of these questions, so the training and the summaries decide it. A firm that wins one of those does not automatically win the other, which is why a single screenshot of a good answer proves very little.

Finding two, a published price is rarer than a quoted price

Across the six answers the engines attached a price shaped claim to 33 firms. We opened the vendor pages for 32 of them on 22 October 2026.

• 14 firms publish a figure on their own site that matches or contains the claim. Examples we read in full: Grow Law at 2,500 dollars a month for SEO, 1,450 for PPC and 599 for website design. Attorney Pro Marketing at 297 a month for Google Business Profile work and 997 plus 15 per cent of ad spend for Google Ads. Real Geeks at 399 a month plus a 500 dollar setup. Powered by Search at 6,000 a month for paid media and 9,000 for SEO and answer engine work. Hook Agency with a full per service card, 2,800 for local SEO, 4,000 for answer engine work and 2,000 for paid search.
• 11 publish nothing on pages that loaded normally. Several of those pages carry impressive results instead: one firm publishes 412 signed cases and a client's organic site value moving from 41,200 to 747,000 dollars, with no fee anywhere.
• 7 could not be read at all that day: two 403s, three 404s on the pricing URL, one redirect to a contact form, and one 202 with a zero byte body. A status code records what a server did on a date.

So roughly four in ten of the priced recommendations can be checked by a buyer, and the rest are an engine's description of a market. Both are useful. Only one of them belongs in a budget.

Finding three, the citation is often a ranking published by a ranked firm

This showed up in four of the six verticals, and it is the single most useful thing to know about these answers.

• Dental. ChatGPT cited harrisandward.com/top-5-dental-marketing-agencies/, a 2,904 word ranking published by Harris and Ward, which places Harris and Ward first. The engine then recommended Harris and Ward third. In the same answer it warned, in its own words, that many published rankings are produced by agencies that also compete for your business.
• SaaS. Gemini cited saashero.net, whose own key takeaways state that 13 of 16 B2B SaaS agency lists in the fourth quarter of 2026 were published by agencies that included themselves. That page is published by SaaS Hero and recommends SaaS Hero, which makes it the fourteenth.
• Real estate. Gemini cited azulio.ai, a page that opens by declaring Azulio the best real estate marketing company in the United States in 2026, and recommended Azulio third. Its other citation for that answer, dmrmedia.org/blog/best-real-excel-marketing-agencies, returns HTTP 404 on a misspelled slug, where the correctly spelled URL returns 200.
• HVAC. Three of Gemini's four sources were agency published rankings, including hookagency.com/blog/hvac-marketing-agencies/ and a competitor's best HVAC agencies post.

None of that makes the rankings worthless. The dental ranking published by a ranked firm is the one place we found Harris and Ward's 850 dollar starting price, and it states plainly that a rival's pricing is not published. The rule it gives a buyer is simple: open the citations, see who published each one, and weigh the shortlist accordingly. For how this looks when the question is about famous agencies rather than vertical specialists, we measured that separately in which famous marketing agencies an assistant actually names for an American buyer.

Finding four, the engines describe the transparent vendors least accurately

Hook Agency publishes the most itemised card in the whole exercise, read on hookagency.com/pricing on 22 October 2026: local SEO from 2,800 dollars a month, answer engine work at 4,000 a month or 2,000 when added to SEO, paid search from 2,000, Meta ads from 3,000, a templated website at 1,000 a month totalling 12,000 over twelve months and a custom site at 2,000 a month totalling 24,000. Gemini described it as custom monthly retainers and supplied a generic trade range of 2,500 to 5,000 dollars.

The same thing happened twice more. Circulation Dental was presented as the budget option on the strength of its 400 and 600 dollar add ons, while the same page headlines all plans starting at 1,200 dollars a month per location. Basic was presented as the first option for smaller Shopify brands at 200,000 to 3 million dollars of annual revenue, while its own page asks for 100,000 dollars a month or more and works only with jewellery brands. In each case the published detail was more restrictive than the summary.

Finding five, three vertical agencies now sell answer engine work by the month

In three different verticals, a specialist agency publishes a monthly price for being found in AI answers, as a line item separate from SEO. Hook Agency, home services, 4,000 dollars a month or 2,000 added to an SEO package. Bay Leaf Digital, B2B SaaS, 3,999 dollars a month on a six month engagement, baselined across ChatGPT and Claude among others. Basic, Shopify ecommerce, 2,000 dollars a month standalone or 3,000 bundled with performance marketing against 4,000 bought separately.

Three independent firms in three unrelated trades have put a four figure monthly price on it, which is what a forming market looks like. It also means a contractor comparing HVAC proposals in 2026 is comparing answer engine line items, which did not exist in a trade retainer two years ago. The trade specific version of that decision is in best HVAC marketing agencies compared and the three markets an HVAC campaign has to separate.

How to use these answers without being steered by them

• Ask both engines, not one. Across six verticals the overlap was 8 names out of 51, so one engine gives you a sixth of the candidate set.
• Open every citation in the answer and note who published it. Four of our six verticals had a ranked firm's own ranking in the source list.
• Treat a range as a market description and a figure with a URL as a price. Four in ten of the priced names here had a figure you can open.
• Read the fit line before the price line. Two of the best disclosures we found were vendors stating in writing who they are wrong for.
• Get three proposals on one written scope, and compare the same unit: cost per booked patient, per signed matter, per completed job, per closed transaction, per acquired customer. Not one of the 51 firms published that unit.

Where we sit in this, stated plainly

AI Knows Us is not a marketing agency in any of these six verticals. We buy no media, write no campaigns, build no websites and pitch for no retainers, so nothing above is a bid against the 51 firms named in those answers. We ran this measurement because it is the thing we sell: the buyer questions asked on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, with the client's name absent from the question, and a report on which names come back and which sources produced them. On the evidence above, the party doing the marketing is the wrong party to grade whether the answer names you.

Our own rates, from aiknowsus.com/llms.txt read 22 October 2026, held to the standard this page asks of everybody else: SEO Start 149 dollars a month in the US watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, Growth 299 watches 100 questions on all five engines weekly with 1,200 scheduled answers, Scale 599 watches 300, Agency 1,299 watches 80 with 12,300 credits, Everything 1,799 watches 300. Growth is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, and a Claude check costs three credits where most cost one.

Where rivals beat us, by name and with the figures from our own fetches on 22 October 2026. tryprofound.com/pricing publishes SSO and SAML, SOC 2 compliance, unlimited seats and up to nine answer engines on its enterprise tier, where we read five engines and our pricing page carries no SSO, no SAML, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement in 119,203 bytes. brightlocal.com/pricing publishes a per location ladder from 41 dollars a month for one site, with a local AI visibility tracker on that tier, which is a tenth of our cheapest engine watching plan. seranking.com publishes 100 prompts and 10 projects at 129 dollars a month. And our own pricing page contradicts itself on multi business coverage, listing "businesses covered 1 1 1 1 1 1 10 1" while the row beneath reads "more than one business, no" in every column, which anybody buying for several sites should raise with us before paying.

What this study establishes and what it does not. It is one question per vertical per engine on one night, which fixes exactly what each engine said then and does not describe a month of behaviour. It grades engine agreement and published disclosure, not the quality of anybody's marketing work. Every status code quoted is a record of what a server returned on 22 October 2026, and a firm unreadable that day may publish a full card tomorrow.

What buyers ask about agency shortlists from AI assistants

Do ChatGPT and Gemini recommend the same marketing agencies

Rarely. Across six US verticals measured on 21 October 2026 they named 51 firms and agreed on 8, and in five of the six verticals the agreement was a single name. Ask both, and treat the union as your candidate list.

Why does one engine quote prices that are not on the vendor's site

Because it is describing the market rather than reading the page, and the two look identical in a bulleted answer. Of 32 price claims we checked, 14 were published by the vendor, 11 were absent from pages that loaded and 7 sat behind a server that refused or returned nothing.

Is the first agency in the list the best one

It is the best candidate that engine assembled from what it read that minute. The firm placed third in one dental answer published the ranking the engine cited. Order is a reading, not a verdict.

Which unit should I ask every agency to report

The one your business is run on: booked new patients, signed matters, completed jobs, closed transactions, acquired customers. None of the 51 firms published a cost per outcome, so it has to be written into your reporting rather than found in a proposal.

How do I find out what the engines say about my own category

Fix the question a buyer would ask with your name left out, ask it on each engine, and record every business named and every URL cited. Repeat on a schedule and compare. The citation list is the actionable half, because those pages are what you can go and change.