The four rooms a brand now lives in

A brand used to live in one room: the index. You earned a URL, you earned a rank, you earned a click. The room had rules, and the rules were public enough to argue about.

There are four rooms now, at minimum. Google still has the index, and it has Overviews. ChatGPT has a trained prior plus browsing. Perplexity is a citation machine with a live web. Gemini sits on the same corpus as Search and behaves like a colleague who has read your docs. Copilot, Claude, and Apple Intelligence are further rooms with their own retrieval manners.

A page that ranks can fail in chat. A brand that is mentioned in press can fail in Overviews. A product with perfect schema can be hallucinated because the model last saw a reseller's outdated spec sheet. The practice is to map, for each room, how a fact enters — crawl, training, retrieval, tool use — and to keep one public record that all of them can trust.

Start with a prompt panel of twenty questions you should own. Run them monthly in each room. Write down who got cited. That log is the strategy. Everything else is decoration.