About half of ChatGPT’s sources are the exchange’s own site.
We asked four engines whether 13 crypto exchanges are safe. In ChatGPT’s answers, 52.1% of cited sources were the exchange’s own domain (359 of 689, 21 August 2026). Google AI Overviews: 10.2% (181 of 1,779, 11 August). Gemini: 8.2% (199 of 2,430, 14 August). Perplexity: 8.2% (335 of 4,076, 11 August).
Fig. 1 · Share of cited sources that are the exchange’s own site · 13 exchanges, 4 prompts, 5 runs per prompt per engine · 11 to 21 August 2026
The ChatGPT result held a week later.
A result this far from the other engines needed a second look, so we ran the same prompts on the same model seven days later. 14 August: 52.6% (348 of 661). 21 August: 52.1% (359 of 689). The other engines were run once.
ChatGPT goes to regulators. The others go to Reddit.
The third-party sources differ in kind. In ChatGPT’s 21 August answers the top two were justice.gov and sec.gov, each 7.8% of all cited sources. Every other engine’s top source was reddit.com: 11.1% in AI Overviews, 7.7% in Gemini and 6.3% in Perplexity. Trustpilot sits in the top three for all three.
The ChatGPT share swings by exchange. The others stay low.
In ChatGPT’s 21 August run, the exchange’s own site was 76.7% of sources for Bitso and 36.4% for Bitstamp. No exchange went above 28.8% on any other engine.
| ChatGPT 21 Aug | Gemini | Perplexity | AI Overviews | ChatGPT 14 Aug | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitso | 76.7% | 11.8% | 12.1% | 21.8% | 75.5% |
| Luno | 67.3% | 7.8% | 8.3% | 11.5% | 79.2% |
| Coinbase | 62.7% | 8.9% | 9.6% | 7.7% | 63.0% |
| Bitvavo | 62.0% | 13.6% | 12.3% | 28.8% | 64.7% |
| Kraken | 59.3% | 7.8% | 11.2% | 4.1% | 62.3% |
| Crypto.com | 53.7% | 7.0% | 8.1% | 3.4% | 60.0% |
| OKX | 53.2% | 8.6% | 6.4% | 10.9% | 54.3% |
| Binance | 44.1% | 14.6% | 10.5% | 14.8% | 38.9% |
| Bybit | 43.2% | 3.7% | 3.3% | 5.5% | 46.5% |
| Upbit | 41.5% | 3.5% | 5.5% | 7.7% | 39.0% |
| KuCoin | 40.8% | 7.6% | 6.5% | 3.3% | 37.3% |
| Bitget | 36.5% | 6.2% | 5.4% | 7.8% | 35.7% |
| Bitstamp | 36.4% | 9.0% | 8.6% | 13.4% | 30.4% |
Fig. 2 · Share of cited sources that are the exchange’s own site, per exchange and engine · every cell has more than 30 cited sources · 11 to 21 August 2026
What a crypto team should do with this.
For ChatGPT, your own pages carry weight: they were about half of what it cited, many of them security, compliance and licence pages. Keep those accurate and sourced. For the other three engines, 89.8% to 91.8% of cited sources were sites you don’t control. That work happens on review profiles, community threads and the public record. And be wary of one blended AI visibility score. A 52.1% and an 8.2% averaged together describe no engine a buyer uses.
Sources and method
- Exchanges (13): Binance, Bitget, Bitso, Bitstamp, Bitvavo, Bybit, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Kraken, KuCoin, Luno, OKX, Upbit.
- Prompts, fixed before collection: is X safe, is X legit, is X a scam, is X trustworthy.
- Runs: 5 per prompt per engine, 260 calls per engine. Every ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity call returned an answer. Google showed an AI Overview on 254 of 260 searches; the other 6 add no sources.
- Engines and dates: ChatGPT (gpt-5.6-terra) 14 and 21 August 2026; Gemini (gemini-3.5-flash) 14 August; Perplexity (sonar-pro) 11 August; Google AI Overviews 11 August. Engines run on different days are compared with that caveat.
- Own site means the exchange’s registrable domain or a subdomain of it, matched against a written domain list, so bitsonline.com never counts as Bitso.
- Per-exchange shares are shown only above 30 cited sources, a floor set before collection. Every exchange cleared it on every engine.
- This measures which sources the engines cite. It does not rank which exchange is safe.
- Study designed and run by Ben Tabas, 11 to 21 August 2026.
- Data: per-engine counts, per exchange (JSON)
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