What is an AI Assistant?
An AI assistant is the product wrapped around a language model: the chat interface, the web search integration, the memory, the app. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot are assistants. When people say 'AI told me', they mean an assistant's answer.
Assistant vs model
The model is the engine; the assistant is the car. Two assistants on similar models can answer the same buyer question differently because of retrieval, system prompts, and product decisions. Monitoring brand visibility per assistant, not just per model, reflects what buyers actually see.
Why they matter for brands
Assistants compress research. A buyer who would have visited ten sites now reads one answer that names two or three brands. Being one of those names is the new distribution question, and each assistant decides it a little differently.