- Format matters: asking for a comparison, table, list, or ranking consistently surfaces more brands; a ranking prompt adds about +20% average visibility over open-ended questions.
- Keywords beat conversation: concise keyword-style prompts (“best CRM small business 2026”) yield up to +25% more brand mentions than persona-engineered prompts (“You are an IT consultant…”), which broaden into less brand-dense educational paths.
- Constraints split by engine: adding budget or feature constraints reduces the brands shown in ChatGPT and Perplexity but increases them in Gemini and Google AI Overviews — potentially by triggering extra fan-out queries.
- Length is irrelevant: filler and conversational words have effectively zero impact on which brands appear.
Prompt style changes how many brands AI answers show
Peec’s 37,804-response study (2026) — ranking/list prompts surface ~20% more brands and keyword-style prompts up to 25% more than open-ended questions; filler length has zero effect.
How a prompt is styled — not just what it means — changes which brands AI engines surface. From Peec’s study of 1,754 prompts and 37,804 AI responses across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews (published study, 2026):