That second point is the one most studios miss. It changes where "going global" work should start.
The baseline most studios are actually starting from
What we actually measured. We ran 32 questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — 96 question-instances total, zero failures — as a baseline on 2026-07-29, then reran the 32 ChatGPT questions on 08-01 as a check. Same result both times: zero formal recommendation placements, zero citations to our own domain, across both rounds. We're not citing this to complain — we're citing it because it's the actual starting condition most companies in this space are in, whether they've measured it or not. If you assume you're already "in the AI answers" because you rank on Google, that assumption is very likely wrong until you test it.
Name collision is the default, not the edge case
The engines don't even agree on who exists. Across the same baseline, we saw entity confusion on every engine we tested, and each engine confused us with a different thing. ChatGPT answered with three different same-named companies (one US-based, one focused on export lead generation). Gemini answered with a same-named outsourcing operation based in India. And when the earlier product name was queried on its own, it got answered as a GPS fleet-tracking app or a Gmail tracking browser extension — not as a marketing or growth product at all. In the 08-01 recheck, ChatGPT had started actively disambiguating between two same-named companies — but the disambiguation list didn't include us either. The takeaway for a studio going global under a Chinese-market name or a generic English one: name collision is not a hypothetical risk, it is the default outcome until an engine has enough clean signal to sort it out.
Community threads, not company domains, feed the answers
Where the citations actually go. This is the part that should reshape a go-global content plan. Across our question set, Reddit-ecosystem sources (reddit.com plus official subreddits) accounted for roughly 46 question-instances of citations — by far the heaviest single source cluster we saw. LinkedIn was the second most-cited domain specifically on English-language questions, appearing in about 6 question-instances. Wikipedia and arXiv each showed up in about 6. And the engines are not uniform in how citation-hungry they are: Perplexity pulled the most volume by far — 329 citations across the 32 questions — while Gemini, across the same 32 questions, surfaced only about 21 citations total. That's a narrow citation surface, and it means Gemini is choosier about what it treats as source-worthy, not that it's giving your brand a fair look and rejecting it.
Put those two facts together — Reddit dominates the citation pool, and company domains show up close to never — and the implication for a studio's go-global plan is direct: a polished website and an App Store page are necessary, but they are not what the current generation of answer engines is reading when someone asks "is X studio legitimate" or "what do players say about X game." The engines are reading community threads. If your studio has no real footprint in the places players and developers actually discuss games — subreddits, community platforms, developer forums — you are, in the eyes of these systems, largely invisible, independent of how good the game or product is.
We also saw, in the same runs, a list of competitor names the engines volunteered when asked about services in this space — we're not going to evaluate any of them here, only note that the list existed and was inconsistent across engines, which reinforces the same point: there is no single default answer any of these systems converge on yet.
Groundwork before launch, not marketing after it
What this means for sequencing. For a Chinese studio building a go-global plan, the practical order isn't "ship the game, then localize the store page, then eventually think about brand." Given what these engines are actually citing, community presence needs to start earlier than most teams schedule it — not as a marketing afterthought once the game is live, but as groundwork that starts while the game is still being finished, so that when players and journalists start asking AI tools about you, there's something real for those tools to find and cite. That's also the layer where confusion gets resolved: an engine that has real, attributable community discussion to point to is less likely to hand your name to a same-named company on another continent.
We track this kind of thing continuously through MaxGrowth Answers, part of MaxGrowth (maxgrowth.ai), operated by 北京口袋智创科技有限公司 — not because we think any single measurement settles the question, but because entity confusion and citation patterns both shift over time, and a one-off check goes stale fast. If you're planning a global launch, the useful exercise isn't guessing whether you show up — it's finding out, on the specific questions your future players or partners would actually ask.
Want to see how AI engines describe your brand today?
Get a free growth audit