In Italian, ChatGPT reads Reddit and Perplexity reads the Yellow Pages

When ChatGPT answers someone in Italian who is looking for a business, the site it opens most often is Reddit, the forum where people trade advice. Perplexity, given the same kind of question, opens Pagine Gialle, the Italian Yellow Pages: it does so in 331 answers out of 885, more than one in three.

A forum instead of a directory

In Italian, ChatGPT reads Reddit in 89 answers out of 973, just over nine in a hundred, and no other site turns up as often in its Italian answers.

The directory, almost never

Pagine Gialle, the first place Perplexity looks, ChatGPT opened in 2 of its 973 Italian answers.

Same shape in Spanish

In Spanish, Perplexity does the same with Páginas Amarillas: it reads them in 208 answers out of 835, just under one in four. ChatGPT, in Spanish too, goes there far less often.

How much each one reads

To write an answer, Perplexity reads 10.6 different sites on average, ChatGPT 4.1. And Perplexity never answers without reading at least one.

Almost one ChatGPT answer in five, with no sites

ChatGPT, on the other hand, read no site at all in 418 answers out of 2,245, just under one in five. Those answers declare no reading at all: they come from what the model already knows, or from reading it does not disclose.

Reddit, across languages

Counting every language, Reddit is in 7.8% of ChatGPT's answers and in 1.3% of Perplexity's: about eight in a hundred against just over one in a hundred.

What it means if you run a business

To show up on Perplexity, directory listings matter, because they are among the things it reads most often. For ChatGPT, what people write about you on forums matters too, and that is not something you can write yourself. Either way there is your own site, which assistants only read if it lets itself be read.

Where to start

At mador.ai/en/leggibile you can check for free, in a few seconds, whether assistants get into your site and how much text they find. Growth, at 249 € a month, writes and publishes the pages that answer the questions asked in your area, so that your site is among the sites read.

What this does not tell you

The areas and categories are the ones Mador measures, and some weigh more than others: with other businesses the sites read change. A site read tells you where the assistant went to look, not why it picked a name. And an answer reused from one measurement to the next is counted only once here.