NEW YORK, September 10 — A LinkedIn post from a marketing CEO has touched off a fresh argument about how the search industry measures artificial intelligence platforms, and whether Perplexity still belongs on the scoreboard at all. Ross Hudgens, chief executive of the content marketing agency Siege Media, wrote that Perplexity’s market share is shrinking and declared, “Everyone should remove Perplexity from their LLM trackers today.” His concern is weighting.
If a tracking tool counts Perplexity alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google’s AI search products, marketers can end up with a distorted picture of where their visibility actually matters.
The numbers behind the argument
There is real movement in the data. StatCounter’s worldwide AI chatbot referral figures show Perplexity at 7.91% in June, essentially tied with Gemini at 7.94%. By August, Perplexity had slipped to 4.31% while Gemini climbed to 10.9%.
Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, agrees Hudgens is asking the right question but is less convinced he has the right answer. Jarboe points out that referral share and usage are not the same thing, and that the AI search market is concentrating around a handful of major platforms without having reached the point where SEO professionals can confidently focus on the “four major models” and stop looking elsewhere.
Similarweb’s latest publicly available comparison, from May 2026, put ChatGPT at 53.9% of worldwide web visits among seven major AI assistants, Gemini at 27.9%, Claude at 9.2%, DeepSeek at 4.1%, Grok at 2.4%, and both Perplexity and Copilot at 1.3%. Jarboe says Hudgens’ concern about weighting is understandable. If an SEO platform gives Perplexity the same weight as ChatGPT even though Perplexity represents only a tiny fraction of traffic in the relevant market, a particularly strong or weak result on Perplexity could distort the aggregate score.
Think of it like averaging a major league team’s batting stats with a weekend softball league’s — the small sample can swing the total.
A three-tier market, not a settled leaderboard
Jarboe reads the data as pointing to a three-tier market rather than a settled leaderboard. That distinction matters for anyone deciding where to spend time and budget. He has seen this movie before.
In March 2002, Jarboe attended Search Engine Strategies in Boston during the aftermath of the dot-com crash, while working for an SEO agency in Greater Boston that tracked clients’ rankings across 15 different search engines. Someone at the conference argued for simplifying reporting to the five major search engines of the day: Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves.
Jarboe pointed out that Google was missing from the list. That turned out to be an important omission, as Google was gaining search share rapidly even though it was not yet one of the obvious incumbents everyone agreed belonged on the list.
That experience makes Jarboe cautious about declaring any emerging search market “settled.” He frames the question as not simply which platforms are the biggest today, but which are big enough, growing fast enough, or strategically important enough that ignoring them could cause an SEO to miss the next shift. The practical upshot for marketers is a familiar tension.
Dropping Perplexity from a tracker cleans up the aggregate score, but it also removes a signal from a platform that could still matter. Jarboe’s position is that the market has not yet earned that kind of confidence. The article, written by VIP contributor Greg Jarboe, was published 18 hours before the source snapshot and is a 9-minute read with 281 reads at the time of capture.
Related SEJ coverage includes “AI Search Isn’t Replacing Google, It’s Layering On Top – Similarweb Data.” What to watch next is whether Perplexity’s referral share stabilizes or keeps sliding through the fall, and whether the platforms marketers treat as the default set hold at four — or whether the next Google is sitting somewhere nobody has thought to add to the list yet.
