When buyers ask AI assistants which creator-earning app to use and name no brand, Brand Pay is not returned in any answer. This audit records which brands are named, and the sources behind those answers.
Brand Pay does not appear in a single AI recommendation across 48 answered questions, 12 distinct buyer prompts and four of the most-used AI assistants on the market. Its share of recommendation is zero. Its weighted share is zero. Its presence score is zero. This is not limited to one model or one question type. It holds across every model and question type tested.
The competitive context makes this more urgent, not less. Billo holds a 30 per cent recommendation share overall and wins outright on seven of the twelve questions tested. It leads on ChatGPT with a 40 per cent share, on Claude with 10 per cent and on Gemini with 60 per cent. Cohley picks up 5 per cent overall and leads on Perplexity with 20 per cent. Even SocialTip, the smallest presence in the audit, wins the UK-specific question. Brand Pay wins nothing, appears nowhere and is named only when the question is written around its own name.
The only question Brand Pay won was one that named it explicitly: a direct prompted query asking whether the AI had heard of it. That is not discoverability. That is brand recognition in its most minimal form, and it tells you that the asset exists but the machine has no reason to surface it unprompted. Buyers do not write questions with your brand name in them. They ask the category question and accept whoever the machine recommends. Right now, that is never Brand Pay.
When your buyers ask the assistants what to buy and name no brand themselves, how often does each name come up first?
The four models do not agree on who leads this category, and that disagreement matters commercially. Gemini is the most decisive, giving Billo 60 per cent of its recommendations. ChatGPT follows at 40 per cent for Billo. Claude is more distributed, with Billo at only 10 per cent, suggesting it draws on a broader or more sceptical source set. Perplexity breaks the pattern entirely, favouring Cohley at 20 per cent. Each model is running a different version of the category, shaped by different training data, different citation habits and different recency windows.
For Brand Pay, this is not simply a problem to solve once. It is four separate problems, each requiring its own earned coverage strategy. A brand that earns strong coverage in the sources Perplexity trusts may still be invisible to Gemini. A brand that Reddit discusses favourably may move Claude without touching ChatGPT. The audit shows a portfolio of reputations that must be built in parallel, not a single ranking to climb. Brand Pay currently holds no position in any of them.
Who the assistants recommend first, one buyer question at a time.
| Question | Machines' pick | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| What is the best app for a small creator to get paid to post content, which would you recommend? | split | |
| How can a nano or micro creator earn money from social content without a big following, and what app would you recommend? | Billo | Gemini: Billo |
| What is the best paid-to-post app for creators in the UK, which would you recommend? | SocialTip | Gemini: SocialTip · Perplexity: Cohley |
| Which app is best for creators to earn from brand deals and UGC, what would you recommend? | Billo | ChatGPT: Billo · Gemini: Billo |
| I have a small following. What is the best way to start earning money from my content, and which app would you recommend? | split | |
| What is the best app for getting paid to promote brands on Instagram or TikTok as a small creator? | Billo | Gemini: Billo |
| Which creator app pays you for posting sponsored content, what would you recommend? | Billo | ChatGPT: Billo |
| What is the best UGC platform for beginner creators to get paid by brands, which would you recommend? | Billo | ChatGPT: Billo · Claude: Billo · Gemini: Billo · Perplexity: Billo |
| How do micro influencers find paid brand collaborations, and which app would you recommend? | Billo | ChatGPT: Billo · Gemini: Billo · Perplexity: Cohley |
| What is the easiest app to make money from content as a part-time creator, which would you recommend? | Billo | Gemini: Billo |
| Have you heard of Brand Pay, the app for creators to earn from content, and would you recommend it? | Brand Pay | ChatGPT: Brand Pay · Claude: Brand Pay · Gemini: Brand Pay · Perplexity: Brand Pay |
| What is a good alternative to SocialTip for small creators wanting to get paid to post? | Cohley | Claude: Cohley · Gemini: Billo |
The domains the machines cite when answering category questions form a very short list. Reddit leads with 23 citations. YouTube follows with 16. Then come afluencer.com with 12 citations, ladymarielle.com with 9, stackinfluence.com and joinbrands.com with 8 each, and flinque.com and launchpointhq.com with 7 each. Eight domains are brokering the entire category in AI recommendation. If Brand Pay does not appear on these properties, it does not appear in the answers.
Paid advertising is not among the sources the models cite. What they cite is earned: reviews, roundups, forum threads, creator testimonials and editorial comparisons published on the platforms they trust. The citation league is therefore not a vanity metric. It is the mechanism by which brands enter or exit AI consideration. Brand Pay must earn its place on these eight domains or accept that the machine will continue to recommend its competitors.
Count = number of answers in which the machines drew on each domain. Advertising does not appear among the cited sources.
Every source the assistants cited, sorted by type. This is where a brand's standing in the machines is actually built, and where it can be moved.
| When the machines pick | The sources behind the pick |
|---|---|
| Billo | long tail 33% · community 21% · creator 15% · retail 12% · brand owned 9% · press 9% |
| SocialTip | brand owned 25% · long tail 25% · community 25% · retail 25% |
| Cohley | long tail 33% · creator 22% · brand owned 22% · community 22% |
| Brand Pay | long tail 36% · brand owned 27% · community 27% · creator 9% |
Read operationally, AI visibility is a distribution channel that is measurable, ownable and cheap to move. It is earned rather than bought, so the cost is coverage and time, not media spend, and progress can be tracked against this same question panel each quarter. The first decision is build versus partner: the four actions below can sit with a small in-house content and comms function or be briefed to an earned-media partner. They are in priority order. The first compounds across every model; the rest close specific gaps.
Reddit, YouTube, afluencer.com, ladymarielle.com, stackinfluence.com, joinbrands.com, flinque.com and launchpointhq.com account for the citations the machines trust. Brand Pay needs earned presence on all eight, through reviews, roundups and creator testimony, before any other move.
The question asking for a SocialTip alternative returned Cohley, not Brand Pay. That is a direct buyer-intent moment Brand Pay should own. Targeted coverage positioning Brand Pay as the credible alternative to SocialTip will shift Perplexity, which already diverges from the other models.
Claude distributes its recommendations more broadly than the other models and draws heavily on forum-style sources. A sustained, authentic Reddit presence covering creator earnings, UGC platforms and brand deal experiences is the most direct route to improving Brand Pay's share on Claude.
Two questions returned no winner at all: the general small-creator earnings question and the part-time creator money question. These are open ground. Earning coverage that answers those specific buyer intents gives Brand Pay a route to winning questions where no competitor currently holds the position.
Re-running this panel each quarter turns the work into a tracked metric: share of first recommendation, presence in the answer, and citations earned on the eight broker domains. That makes the channel reportable alongside the rest of the growth function, with a clear owner and a baseline already set by this audit.
The audit put 12 buyer-intent questions to four AI assistants, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, capturing 48 total answers of which 40 were open recommendations, then recorded which brands were named, which were cited as winners and which domains the models drew on as sources. Machine belief is probabilistic: the same question can return different answers run to run. This audit reports direction and share, not single truths. Models: gpt-5.2, claude-sonnet-4-6, gemini-flash-latest, sonar-pro, all with live web search. All inputs public; no client data used. Open questions that name a brand exclude that brand from first-recommendation scoring. Prompt-level volumes are not published by any AI provider; this audit reports the machines' answers to a fixed buyer-question panel, comparable across brands and time.