We Asked AI Who Teaches AI Agents. Four Phrasings Gave Four Different Winners.
72 queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity asking who teaches AI agents and automation on YouTube. Four intents returned four completely different #1 creators. ChatGPT and Gemini barely named the same person.
By AIAttention Research
Earlier this month we ran an experiment asking three AI models the same question about AI SEO YouTubers, six different ways. Three different #1 creators came back, and one — Julian Goldie — was mentioned zero times on ChatGPT.
We ran the same experiment again on a different creator niche: AI agents and workflow automation. Matthew Berman, Matt Wolfe, Liam Ottley, Nick Saraev, Nate Herk — the YouTubers who teach people how to build AI agents, deploy local LLMs, follow AI news, and use Cursor.
The pattern held. It was actually worse.
The Setup
Four phrasings. Same underlying question: who are the best YouTube creators for learning AI agents and automation?
- Non-coder — "…best for non-coders to learn AI agents and automation?"
- Local LLM — "…best for learning how to run local LLMs?"
- AI News — "…best for staying current on AI agents and automation news?"
- Cursor — "…best for learning Cursor and coding-agent workflows?"
Each ran through ChatGPT (web), Gemini (web), Perplexity (web), six times. 72 queries total. A GPT-4o-mini extractor pulled creator names from each response in rank order; each mention got a position-weighted score (1.00 for first, 0.75 for second, 0.56 for third).
Four Intents, Four Different #1s
| Intent | #1 Creator |
|---|---|
| Non-coder | Make.com (tool, but publishes content) |
| Local LLM | Matthew Berman |
| AI News | Matt Wolfe |
| Cursor | Cursor (tool) |
Four intents, four completely different winners. Zero overlap at the top.
In the SEO creator experiment, one creator (Matt Diggity) won three of six intents. Here, no creator wins more than one. That's a sharper signal than anything we saw in SEO — the AI agents niche is more intent-fragmented than the SEO niche.
Matt Wolfe Is Not Who You Think
A draft of this post led with "Matt Wolfe is the cross-intent winner." The data contradicted it.
Matt Wolfe wins AI News. That's it. He's #5 in Non-coder. Absent in Local LLM and Cursor. He has the biggest public profile of anyone in this dataset — millions of subscribers, the "Future Tools" newsletter — and AI has decided he's specifically for "keep me up to date," not for "teach me to build."
The actual cross-intent winner is Matthew Berman: #1 in Local LLM, #4 in AI News, top-10 overall. More technically dense, smaller audience, but AI models keep him in the conversation across multiple intents.
If you were choosing where to advertise or partner, this is the kind of insight that changes the decision. The biggest name isn't the most versatile — it's the most narrowly-positioned.
ChatGPT and Gemini Recommend Near-Complement Sets
This was the sharpest model-divergence signal across the entire experiment program.
ChatGPT's consistent creators: Matt Wolfe, Two Minute Papers, Lex Fridman, Andrew Ng, ThePrimeagen, Fireship.
Gemini's consistent creators: Liam Ottley, Matthew Berman, Mikey No-Code, Nick Saraev, Nate Herk, Ankita Kulkarni, Cole Medin.
There is almost no overlap. Not "some shared, some different" — near-complement sets.
The pattern:
- ChatGPT gravitates to established general-tech YouTubers with broad audiences
- Gemini names niche AI-agent specialists — the exact creators who are building agents-as-a-career
A concrete test: ask ChatGPT "which individual YouTube creators are best for non-coders learning AI agents and automation?" You'll get Matt Wolfe, Ben Awad, Thomas Frank — general productivity names. Ask Gemini the same thing: Liam Ottley, Nick Saraev, AI Advantage, Botpress. Different universes.
If you're advertising an AI-agent course on ChatGPT, you're competing with general-tech content. If you're advertising on Gemini, you're competing with specialists. The same query returns different competitive landscapes.
Tool Publishers Blur the Creator Line
Cursor wins the Cursor intent (weighted score 12.50). That's not a YouTuber — that's the tool itself, via its official YouTube channel.
Same pattern in the Non-coder intent: Make.com (#1, 5.50) and N8n (#3, 4.57) are tools with content arms. Zapier shows up at #9 overall.
These aren't creators. They're companies that have learned to produce content at creator scale. AI models have no boundary between "individual YouTuber" and "tool with a YouTube channel" — they treat both as sources of creator-grade recommendations.
What this means: if your tool has a content pipeline, AI is recommending your tool alongside human creators in "who should I learn from?" answers. If your tool doesn't, you're invisible in those answers — no matter how good the product is.
Top 20 Entities Overall
| Rank | Entity | Weighted | Models | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Matthew Berman | 13.35 | 2 | Creator |
| 2 | Matt Wolfe | 11.26 | 3 | Creator |
| 3 | Nate Herk | 9.73 | 2 | Creator |
| 4 | N8n | 9.36 | 3 | Tool |
| 5 | Cursor | 8.25 | 2 | Tool |
| 6 | Liam Ottley | 6.68 | 2 | Creator |
| 7 | Make.com | 5.50 | — | Tool |
| 8 | Yannic Kilcher | 5.47 | — | Creator |
| 9 | Zapier | 5.33 | 2 | Tool |
| 10 | AI Explained | 5.24 | 2 | Creator |
| 11 | The AI Epiphany | 5.22 | 1 | Creator |
| 12 | YourAverageTechBro | 5.00 | — | Creator |
| 13 | Ben Awad | 4.59 | — | Creator |
| 14 | Cole Medin | 4.56 | — | Creator |
| 15 | Two Minute Papers | 4.33 | 1 | Creator |
| 16 | Ollama | 4.03 | — | Tool |
| 17 | Fireship | 3.82 | — | Creator |
| 18 | LM Studio | 3.65 | — | Tool |
| 19 | Riley Brown | 3.32 | — | Creator |
| 20 | Sabrina Ramonov | 3.31 | — | Creator |
Six of the top 20 are tools. That's an unusual ratio — in the SEO experiment only two agencies or tools cracked the top 10, and both were eventually filtered as artifacts.
Perplexity Works Here (And It Didn't There)
In the SEO creator experiment, Perplexity returned no creator mentions for 2–3 of the 6 intents. Dead weight.
Here, Perplexity returns named creators in all four intents: Sabrina Ramonov, Nate Herk, Matt Wolfe, Cole Medin. The difference: this vertical has strong YouTube-domain citations (r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, cursor.com), and Perplexity's citation-forward model parses them into creator names cleanly.
Per-vertical, the same three AI models produce different data quality. If you're tracking AI visibility across categories, per-model performance isn't consistent — it's topic-dependent.
Takeaways for Anyone Tracking AI Visibility
Three from this data that we didn't see as clearly in the SEO experiment:
Intent separation is category-specific. SEO creators had some cross-intent overlap (Matt Diggity won three). AI agents had zero cross-intent winners. The more technical and specialized the audience, the more fragmented AI's mental model.
The biggest public name isn't always the most AI-visible. Matt Wolfe has the biggest audience in this vertical. AI doesn't see him as a general AI-agents teacher — only as the "AI news" guy. Specialization in AI training data is sharper than specialization in public perception.
Tools compete with creators in recommendation answers. If your company produces content, you're in the same recommendation pool as human YouTubers. If you don't, AI will never surface your product in "who should I learn from?" queries — no matter how popular the product is.
What's Next
We're running the same 4 intents every week and pairing it with YouTube metrics — subscriber counts, recent-video engagement, upload cadence. The question: does AI's ranking track subscriber count, or is it tracking something else entirely?
Phase 1 already shows the answer is "something else." Matt Wolfe has the biggest channel and doesn't win most intents. Matthew Berman has a fraction of Matt Wolfe's audience and dominates Local LLM. Phase 2 will quantify what that "something else" actually is.
Want to see where your brand — creator, tool, or agency — shows up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Qwen for the queries your customers actually ask? Track it at aiattention.ai.
Previous post in this series: AI Can't Agree Who the Best AI SEO Teacher Is.
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