Comparison pages in AI answers: study data
Past The Click, September 2026

Article (English):  https://pastheclick.com/research/comparison-pages-ai-answers/
Article (Spanish):  https://pastheclick.com/es/investigacion/paginas-comparativas-respuestas-ia/
Article (Japanese): https://pastheclick.com/ja/reports/comparison-pages-ai-answers/

LICENCE
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
You can share and adapt these files for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you credit:
"Past The Click, Comparison pages in AI answers (September 2026)" with a link to the article.

WHAT WAS MEASURED
400 buying questions (prompts) in three industries: money transfers (150), project management software (150) and
US companies hiring or expanding in Japan (100). Each prompt was sent to five AI platforms: ChatGPT with web search on,
Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Answers were collected from each platform's real interface, from the
United States, in English, on 13, 14 and 15 September 2026.
For every answer we recorded the brand it named first and the pages it cited. Cited URLs were matched against a census
of 916 domains, classified by hand and by rule as vendor, third party or community. The most-cited pages (141 of the top
150) were opened to tell comparison pages from other formats. The first brand named was detected against a list of
brands and aliases for each industry.

DEFINITIONS
Comparison page: a page where a company compares itself with its rivals: head-to-head (X vs Y), "alternatives to" a rival,
or its own best-of list. Only pages published by companies in the industry count; review sites and media do not.
Named first: the first brand from the industry list that appears in the answer text. It stands in for "recommended".
The answer text is the whole answer without the source labels the platforms insert (such as "Wise +2") or inline
images. Corrected on 29 September 2026: the first release (15 September) counted brands in the first 600 characters
of each answer only. The finding held; the figures changed, and the Japan B2B leader gap is no longer clear. Counting rule: the answer
without the citation labels, chips and source titles each platform adds (per-platform parser, 29 September 2026).
Top 3 brands: the three most-mentioned brands in each industry. They were the same on all three dates.
Combined: counts and bases added across the three dates.

FILES
prompts.csv (400 rows)
  id              prompt identifier
  prompt          the text sent to every platform
  industry        money transfers, project management, Japan B2B
  intent          recommendation (120), first-person situation (120), comparison without brands (60),
                  alternatives to the leader (40), informational (control) (60)
  style           search query (138) or conversation (262)
  segment         where it applies: destination country code for money transfers (JP, MX, IN, PH...), buyer or need for
                  project management (agencies, nonprofits, time tracking, flat-rate pricing...), market entry or
                  employer of record for Japan B2B
  japan_related   yes when the prompt involves Japan
  origin          generated across variation axes (272), real FAQ question (74), competitor page heading (36),
                  Reddit phrasing (18)
  words           word count of the prompt
  country         country the prompt was sent from
  language        language of the prompt

results-by-date.csv (367 rows)
  section         group of figures, in article order
  measure         what is counted
  group           industry, platform, publisher or brand the row describes
  detail          format of the page, the brand, or the leader named in the prompt
  date            2026-09-13, 2026-09-14, 2026-09-15 or combined; stability rows name the dates they compare
  count           answers or citations that meet the measure
  base            answers or citations the percentage is taken over (empty for plain totals)
  percent         count / base x 100, one decimal
  url             the exact page, for pages followed by URL

LIMITS
United States and English only. Three consecutive days: nothing about change over weeks. "Named first" is a proxy
for "recommended". Some counts are small; every row shows count and base. The data shows what happened together,
not what caused it.

Files are UTF-8 CSV. Questions: https://pastheclick.com/contact/