Case studies / Production List
Production List: ChatGPT 27% to 33%, Perplexity 28% to 37%
On Production List, one of our own brands (ASRM and Production List share an owner), ChatGPT named the site in 27% of 60 tracked buyer questions in mid-September 2026 and 33% two weeks later, and Perplexity went from 28% to 37%, while Claude held flat.
Early read: three weekly runs on the same 60 questions. Both engines peaked in the second run, and Claude held flat.
Disclosure: ASRM, Production List and Gift of Parenthood share an owner. These are our own brands, tracked in ASRM, and the numbers are copied from the tracking runs without adjustment.
“We used ASRM to monitor our platform, productionlist.com, and optimize it for AI searches and prompts. It's working great and is already increasing our presence online.”
The numbers
Share of tracked buyer questions where each engine named Production List, counted on the questions asked in every run. The counts beside each percentage are the raw answers checked.
| Engine | Sep 14 | Sep 21 | Sep 27 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 27% 16 of 60 | 35% 21 of 60 | 33% 20 of 60 |
| Perplexity | 28% 17 of 60 | 45% 27 of 60 | 37% 22 of 60 |
| Claude | 17% 10 of 58 | 17% 10 of 59 | 18% 11 of 60 |
| Google AI Overviews | not tracked | 28% 17 of 60 | 27% 16 of 60 |
Production List passes all nine checks in ASRM's AI readiness audit (checked October 1, 2026).
Selected changes around the tracking window
- September 8, 2026
Verified the site with Bing and turned on IndexNow, which notifies Bing (the index ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot draw on) whenever a page changes. Rewrote the filming-location hub pages to answer "what is filming in this city" directly.
- September 10, 2026
Added an answer block to the top of every production page: one quotable paragraph stating what the project is, who is attached, and where and when it shoots.
- September 11, 2026
Extended the answer blocks to every company and crew page.
- September 14, 2026
Declared content signals in robots.txt (search, AI input and AI training all permitted), published how-to guides that open with a quotable answer, and launched a free MCP server so ChatGPT, Claude and other assistants can query the live directory with tools.
- September 24, 2026
Expanded the production answer blocks to state every fact the cited pages hold.
Read this before quoting the numbers
- Three weekly runs is an early read, not a verdict. AI answers vary from run to run, and both ChatGPT and Perplexity peaked in the second run (35% and 45%) before easing.
- Claude held flat, between 17% and 18%. Google AI Overviews, tracked from the second run, went from 28% to 27%.
- Every number here is counted on the 60 questions asked in all three runs. The set grew to 70 after the first run; the ASRM dashboard counts all 70, which is why it shows ChatGPT at 36% in the third run, and the gain from the second run to the third came from the added questions.
- Gemini was measured only partially in the first two runs and not at all in the third, so it is left out.
- Three runs cannot show what caused the change, or whether it will hold. Several of the changes listed shipped before or on the day of the first run, so it is not a before-optimization baseline, and other site and distribution changes also shipped in this window. ASRM queries the engines directly, so the MCP server, which only answers people who install it, cannot have moved these numbers.
How ASRM measured it
Tracked in ASRM on a curated set of 60 buyer questions our team wrote for this brand, which is more than any plan includes, asked to each engine through its API every week and checked for whether each answer names the brand. Customer plans run 15 to 40 questions that ASRM builds for each brand.
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