AI assistant
An AI assistant is the app people talk to, like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, built around an AI model and its tools, such as web search.
An AI assistant is the app people use to ask an AI something: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude. You type or say a question, and it writes back an answer. Under the hood there's an AI model, but the assistant is more than the model. It decides when to search the web, which pages to read, how to show sources, and what to remember about you.
For marketers, the assistant is what counts, because that's what your customers see.
Assistant and model aren't the same
The same company can give you different answers depending on where you ask. The ChatGPT app might search the web, read five pages and link to them. The model behind it, used directly by a developer without web search, answers from what it learned in training and links to nothing.
For example, ask both "What's the best coffee subscription in the UK?" The app might name Fernhill Coffee because a review it found this morning ranks it first. The bare model might never mention Fernhill, because it learned about coffee subscriptions before Fernhill launched.
So if you test what AI says about your brand, test the assistant your customers use, the way they use it.
Signed in, signed out
Assistants also change their answers for the person asking. When you're signed in, they may know your location, your earlier chats and your preferences. Two people asking the same question can get two different lists of brands.
In AnswerOrbit
We ask in each platform's own app, the one people use, and not through its API. We ask as someone who isn't signed in, from your prompt's market, so you see what a stranger in that country would see. The platform decides which model answers and whether to search the web. How we count explains how we ask each of the six platforms.