From our corpus
What the AI engines actually cite
Counted from the answers we have stored, per engine. Every figure carries the number of answers behind it and the dates they were sampled. A source domain is named only when an engine reached for it across several unrelated sites; one site’s rival appearing in one site’s answers is that site’s business, not the engine’s habit.
Generated 2026-09-07. Floors: an engine needs 100 stored answers; a domain is named at 20 answers across 3 sites. Download as JSON
Perplexity
822 answers · 11 sites · 2026-07-13 to 2026-09-01
- Answers that cite a source
- 100%
- of 822 answers
- Citations per answer
- 18.1
- mean, over all 822 answers
- Distinct domains cited
- 1,550
- across those answers
- Citations to the site being asked about
- 1.8%
- of all citations on this engine. The rest went to somebody else.
| Domain | Answers | Share | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 583 | 71% | 10 |
| youtube.com | 379 | 46% | 7 |
| linkedin.com | 220 | 27% | 10 |
| facebook.com | 161 | 20% | 4 |
| adobe.com | 114 | 14% | 3 |
| gitnux.org | 102 | 12% | 3 |
| canva.com | 84 | 10% | 3 |
| worldmetrics.org | 84 | 10% | 3 |
| medium.com | 82 | 10% | 7 |
| trustpilot.com | 79 | 10% | 6 |
| google.com | 71 | 9% | 8 |
| f6s.com | 70 | 9% | 4 |
| yahoo.com | 70 | 9% | 5 |
| apple.com | 59 | 7% | 5 |
| seranking.com | 59 | 7% | 5 |
ChatGPT
760 answers · 3 sites · 2026-07-25 to 2026-09-01
- Answers that cite a source
- 84%
- of 760 answers
- Citations per answer
- 6.3
- mean, over all 760 answers
- Distinct domains cited
- 1,290
- across those answers
- Citations to the site being asked about
- 3.6%
- of all citations on this engine. The rest went to somebody else.
| Domain | Answers | Share | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 116 | 15% | 3 |
| worldmetrics.org | 52 | 7% | 3 |
| g2.com | 21 | 3% | 3 |
Google AI Mode
691 answers · 15 sites · 2026-08-11 to 2026-09-01
- Answers that cite a source
- 99%
- of 691 answers
- Citations per answer
- 13.2
- mean, over all 691 answers
- Distinct domains cited
- 2,905
- across those answers
- Citations to the site being asked about
- 1.8%
- of all citations on this engine. The rest went to somebody else.
| Domain | Answers | Share | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| youtube.com | 376 | 54% | 14 |
| reddit.com | 182 | 26% | 15 |
| google.com | 124 | 18% | 15 |
| linkedin.com | 93 | 14% | 13 |
| medium.com | 73 | 11% | 13 |
| facebook.com | 61 | 9% | 12 |
| yahoo.com | 51 | 7% | 14 |
| instagram.com | 49 | 7% | 13 |
| adobe.com | 42 | 6% | 4 |
| canva.com | 39 | 6% | 4 |
| g2.com | 31 | 5% | 7 |
| hubspot.com | 31 | 5% | 8 |
| apple.com | 28 | 4% | 7 |
| quora.com | 28 | 4% | 11 |
| semrush.com | 26 | 4% | 3 |
Claude
659 answers · 3 sites · 2026-07-25 to 2026-09-01
- Answers that cite a source
- 99%
- of 659 answers
- Citations per answer
- 10.5
- mean, over all 659 answers
- Distinct domains cited
- 821
- across those answers
- Citations to the site being asked about
- 3.5%
- of all citations on this engine. The rest went to somebody else.
| Domain | Answers | Share | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| medium.com | 94 | 14% | 3 |
| alternativeto.net | 92 | 14% | 3 |
| trustpilot.com | 86 | 13% | 3 |
| scam-detector.com | 41 | 6% | 3 |
| rocketreach.co | 31 | 5% | 3 |
| worldmetrics.org | 25 | 4% | 3 |
What this corpus cannot say
- The sites in this corpus are the ones our customers and we chose to measure. They are not a random sample of the web, and nothing here generalises to sites unlike them.
- Each answer was sampled for one site's own buyer questions, so the engines were asked what those sites' buyers ask, not what the public asks.
- openai: 760 answers, but from only 3 sites. A domain named here for openai clears the 3-site floor by a narrow margin; read it as a lead, not a law.
- anthropic: 659 answers, but from only 3 sites. A domain named here for anthropic clears the 3-site floor by a narrow margin; read it as a lead, not a law.