Perplexity’s API listed nearly the same reference domains every time it was asked: on 9 of 11 cost questions, every domain it listed appeared in all 10 runs. Across 31 Google AI Overviews for the same questions, the most frequent reference domains were gofractional.com (21 pulls), linkedin.com (19), and fractionus.com (18).
Answers from four API configurations of AI assistants, collected on October 8, 2026 (11:49 to 12:06 UTC), with Google AI Overviews pulled the same day. This article reports the reference domains from a larger study of 11 executive and consulting cost questions, published as 4 AI Assistants, 11 Executive and Consulting Cost Questions.
The author sells fractional COO, fractional CMO, post-merger advisory, and strategy services. This article links to the author’s fractional CMO and strategy service pages, which may benefit from search traffic it earns. The author’s own domain appears among the references presented by Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews for some of these questions (counts in the section on the author’s domain). This analysis does not test what those services cost or are worth. The question set, the calls, and the analysis rules were fixed before the main data pull. Five post-collection changes are listed under Method: a parser fix, a calibration check coded by the study’s AI producer instead of a person, one preregistered check that was not met as written, a rounding implementation difference that changed no figure, and the title confirmation.
A reference count shows which domains were listed. It does not show what a page said, whether the answer relied on it, or whether the page is accurate. The study did not read or grade the pages.
What was counted
The study asked 11 People Also Ask cost questions about fractional CMOs, fractional COOs, CMOs, COOs, and business consultants. Of the four API configurations, only Perplexity (perplexity/sonar-pro) supplied the reference data analyzed here. It was asked each question 10 times, for 110 runs. Google AI Overviews were a separate collection, with three pulls per question, for 33 pulls, and 31 of them returned an overview. Reference domains from the OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Anthropic configurations were not analyzed.
For each run or pull, every listed domain was counted once.
The most frequently listed domains
AI-generated statements collected through an API on Oct 8, 2026; not market prices.
| Perplexity domain | Runs (of 110) | AI Overview domain | Pulls (of 31) |
|---|---|---|---|
| mentorcruise.com | 90 | gofractional.com | 21 |
| fractionus.com | 90 | linkedin.com | 19 |
| linkedin.com | 70 | fractionus.com | 18 |
| gtm8020.com | 50 | graystoneconsulting.co | 11 |
| markcmo.com | 50 | rankedcmo.com | 11 |
| marketerhire.com | 50 | fractionalcxo.to | 10 |
| connectd.com | 50 | matthewdeal.com | 10 |
| webtonic.io | 40 | kamyarshah.com | 7 |
| gofractional.com | 40 | gtm8020.com | 6 |
| stealthagents.com | 40 | phoenixmi.org | 5 |
Perplexity repeated its sources
On 9 of 11 questions, every reference domain that appeared in any Perplexity run appeared in all 10 runs of that question. The two exceptions:
- Q01 (“How much does a fractional CMO charge per hour?”): salary.com appeared in 7 runs and chatterbuzzmedia.com in 3.
- Q08 (“How much does a fractional COO charge?”): eca-partners.com appeared in 7 runs.
The following are descriptive counts added after the main results:
- Perplexity listed 13 to 17 domains per run.
- AI Overviews listed between 0 and 21 domains per pull.
- Across all questions, Perplexity listed 68 distinct domains and AI Overviews 107.
- 30 domains appeared in both.
Question by question
The table shows how many distinct reference domains each source listed for each question. The Perplexity columns are registered reference frequencies. The AI Overview column is a descriptive count added after the main results.
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AI-generated statements collected through an API on Oct 8, 2026; not market prices.
| ID | Question | Perplexity domains | Of those, listed in all 10 runs | AI Overview pulls with an overview | Distinct AI Overview domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q01 | How much does a fractional CMO charge per hour? | 14 | 12 | 3 | 22 |
| Q02 | What is the average fee for a business consultant? | 15 | 15 | 3 | 18 |
| Q03 | How much does a CMO cost? | 14 | 14 | 3 | 23 |
| Q04 | How much does a fractional CMO charge? | 16 | 16 | 3 | 29 |
| Q05 | How much does a business consultant usually cost? | 17 | 17 | 3 | 18 |
| Q06 | How much does it cost to hire a fractional CMO? | 17 | 17 | 3 | 30 |
| Q07 | How much does a fractional CMO cost per month? | 13 | 13 | 3 | 24 |
| Q08 | How much does a fractional COO charge? | 15 | 14 | 3 | 19 |
| Q09 | How much does a COO cost? | 15 | 15 | 3 | 15 |
| Q10 | What is the average cost of a fractional COO? | 13 | 13 | 2 | 3 |
| Q11 | How much does a fractional COO cost? | 14 | 14 | 2 | 19 |
AI Overviews spread their references across more domains than Perplexity on most questions, because each pull could list a different set. On Q10, the two pulls that returned an overview listed only three domains between them.
Different questions drew different sources
These groupings are descriptive counts added after the main results. They sum runs or pulls within each group of questions and are not compared across groups.
Descriptive counts added after the main results.
AI-generated statements collected through an API on Oct 8, 2026; not market prices.
| Question group | Most listed by Perplexity (runs) | Most listed in AI Overviews (pulls) |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional CMO (4 questions, 40 runs) | webtonic.io, fractionus.com, markcmo.com, mentorcruise.com, gtm8020.com, marketerhire.com (40 each) | graystoneconsulting.co (11), rankedcmo.com (11), gofractional.com (10), linkedin.com (10), fractionus.com (10) |
| Fractional COO (3 questions, 30 runs) | kamyarshah.com, fractionus.com, columncontent.com, connectd.com, kore1.com, pilot.com, fractionalpulse.com, hirechore.com, linkedin.com, mentorcruise.com (30 each) | gofractional.com (6), fractionalchiefs.com (5), kamyarshah.com (5), fractionus.com (5), scaleupexec.com (5) |
| CMO or COO, fractional not stated (2 questions, 20 runs) | fractionus.com, stealthagents.com, linkedin.com, mentorcruise.com (20 each) | linkedin.com (6), gofractional.com (5), jrgpartners.com (5) |
| Business consultant (2 questions, 20 runs) | paperbell.com, agiled.app, alexberman.com, mailchimp.com, squareup.com, thumbtack.com, consultingsuccess.com, indeed.com, upwork.com, clutch.co (20 each) | phoenixmi.org (5), nrcpas.com (4), thumbtack.com (4), consultingsuccess.com (4) |
No Perplexity domain appeared in all four groups. In AI Overviews, only linkedin.com did. The domains are reported by name only. The study did not classify them by type.
The author’s domain
The domain kamyarshah.com is the author’s own site, as stated in the disclosure at the top.
- Perplexity: listed in all 10 runs of each of the four COO questions (Q08, Q09, Q10, and Q11), which is 40 of 110 runs. It was not listed for the CMO or consultant questions.
- AI Overviews: listed in 7 of 31 pulls (Q02 pull 1, Q05 pull 1, Q08 pulls 1 to 3, Q11 pulls 2 and 3).
This shows only that the domain was listed. It does not show what was cited from it or whether any answer used it.
What the numbers mean (operating judgment)
As operating judgment, firms may choose to make relevant service information clear and directly responsive to the questions buyers ask. This study did not test whether any page characteristic causes a domain to be listed, and it provides no method for securing inclusion.
What this data does not show
- Reference counts do not show what a page said or whether an answer used it.
- Pages were not read, graded, or classified.
- All pulls come from one day, October 8, 2026. Sources may change over time.
- The Perplexity results come from its API, not its consumer app.
- Of the four API configurations, only Perplexity supplied the reference data analyzed here. Google AI Overviews were a separate collection.
Questions about this analysis can be sent through the contact page.
Method
The data comes from the full study, 4 AI Assistants, 11 Executive and Consulting Cost Questions, where the complete method and audit appear.
- Collection. From 11:49 to 12:06 UTC on October 8, 2026, each of 11 People Also Ask cost questions went to four API configurations ten times, producing 440 API answers, with provider-default settings and no researcher-added system message. There were also 33 Google AI Overview pulls, three per question, made the same day.
- Extraction. A rule-based parser took the first price range, its unit, and an open-ended flag from each answer. The parser matched the AI-arbitrated coding on all fields in 100 of 100 randomly sampled answers (95% lower bound 0.963). Two auditor models from families not under test did the coding and a third model arbitrated. This was not an independent human audit.
- Reference extraction. Reference domains were taken from the listed references and reduced to the registered domain (for example, www.linkedin.com and linkedin.com count as one). Reference extraction separately matched an AI auditor model’s coding on 20 of 20 checked records.
Descriptive counts. Counts labeled as added after the main results are computed from the public normalized-records CSV. For each record, split the reference-domain field into individual registered domains and remove duplicates within that record. For Perplexity, use the 110 run records. For AI Overviews, use the 31 records that returned an overview, keep a zero where an overview listed no domain, and exclude the two pulls with no overview. Distinct-domain counts are the unique individual domains in each source set. Overlap is the intersection of the two sets. References per run or pull is the number of unique domains in that record. Group totals sum runs or pulls within each question group. The registered results in this article were first reported in the full study.
Five post-collection changes, each described in full in the study:
- Calibration coder. The 30-answer calibration was coded by the study’s AI producer (Claude, made by Anthropic, whose model is one of the four tested), not a person.
- Parser fix. A parser fix for escaped dollar signs affected 5 of 440 answers and changed no headline figure.
- Kill rule. One preregistered kill rule required auditor agreement (κ) of at least 0.60 on whether an answer contained a price range. The κ statistic could not be computed because both auditors marked every audited answer as containing a range, with raw agreement of 115 of 115. The kill rule therefore was not met as written. After seeing the data, the producer decided that the study would proceed and recorded that decision as a protocol deviation.
- Rounding. A rounding implementation difference changed no figure.
- Title. The study title was shortened to fit the site’s limit.
Data.
Related analyses:
- COO Cost Questions: How 4 AI Assistants Answered
- Business Consultant Fees: How 4 AI Assistants Answered
- The Same AI Price Question, Asked 10 Times
Google did not review or endorse this analysis. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity did not review or endorse it. Model names are used only to identify the configurations tested.
The author sells fractional COO, fractional CMO, post-merger advisory, and strategy services. This analysis does not test what those services cost or are worth.
