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In short
Four findings, strongest first- 87.3M
citation appearances across 767,313 domains and 3,945,269 URLs.
Chapter 01 - 5.7%
of appearances go to the three most-cited domains. The long tail is the larger story.
Chapter 01 - 88.64%
of appearances sit outside the named source taxonomy: a classification limit, not a quality judgement.
Chapter 04 - 31.1%
of classified prompt records are “best of” questions, the largest named intent.
Chapter 05
The index is broad, not dominated by one source.
Provenance
Evidence behind the findings
The index is broad but not dominated by one source. Its biggest analytical limit is classification coverage: 88.64% of citation appearances sit outside the current named source taxonomy.
80.8M
Citation appearances
Sum of citation appearance counts in the latest valid snapshot for each tracked brand.
725.8K
Unique cited domains
Distinct normalized domains present in the current brand citation snapshots.
5.8%
Top three domain share
Share of citation appearances attributed to the three most-cited domains in the current snapshot.
88.4%
Unclassified source share
Citation share assigned to “other” because the source domain is not in the hand-maintained category map.
2,331,894 appearances
1,383,643 appearances
1,257,547 appearances
1,112,883 appearances
602,956 appearances
439,069 appearances
347,352 appearances
319,694 appearances
307,472 appearances
250,193 appearances
How to read this
Count: one source can appear repeatedly across responses and tracked brands, so citation appearances exceed unique URLs.
Concentration: the top three domains hold 5.7%. This describes the tracked panel, not the full web.
Selection: the index reflects prompts tracked for participating brands. It is not a random sample of all questions asked of AI systems.
Attribution: model and geography fields are not retained in this public aggregate. They are not inferred.
Press summary and practical use.
Citation appearances
87,313,920
Unique cited URLs
3,945,269
Top-three share
5.7%
Unclassified share
88.64%
The short version for journalists and analysts
The current index combines citation appearances observed across monitored ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google AI surfaces. youtube.com, google.com and reddit.com lead the domain table, but together they account for only 5.7% of appearances.
The long tail is the larger story: the index covers 767,313 unique cited domains and 3,945,269 URLs across 1,999 tracked brands.
This public aggregate does not retain provider attribution. It cannot say that ChatGPT prefers one source while Perplexity or Google prefers another, and it cannot establish that a page trait caused a citation.
Use the data without overclaiming
- Search the domain table to see whether owned, competitor, publisher, community, or reference sites appear.
- Use the separate page-type study to inspect formats. Raw page URLs are not published in this privacy-filtered aggregate.
- Track the same prompt set over time before treating a source gap as an action target.
Search the domain index.
The explorer covers the top 5,000 domains in the public slim export. Rows with fewer than 3 contributing brands are excluded here and from the download.
| Rank | Domain | Citations | Share | URLs | Brands | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 2,331,894 | 2.67% | 132,280 | 1,468 | Social / UGC |
| 2 | google.com | 1,383,643 | 1.58% | 95,852 | 961 | Other |
| 3 | reddit.com | 1,257,547 | 1.44% | 63,906 | 1,656 | Social / UGC |
| 4 | en.wikipedia.org | 1,112,883 | 1.27% | 27,035 | 1,864 | Reference |
| 5 | linkedin.com | 602,956 | 0.69% | 40,537 | 1,466 | Social / UGC |
| 6 | facebook.com | 439,069 | 0.50% | 30,611 | 1,201 | Social / UGC |
| 7 | edmunds.com | 347,352 | 0.40% | 9,577 | 128 | Other |
| 8 | pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | 319,694 | 0.37% | 13,266 | 513 | Academic |
| 9 | cars.com | 307,472 | 0.35% | 8,442 | 135 | Other |
| 10 | instagram.com | 250,193 | 0.29% | 19,387 | 1,055 | Social / UGC |
| 11 | forbes.com | 234,838 | 0.27% | 7,092 | 1,109 | News & Media |
| 12 | kbb.com | 232,139 | 0.27% | 4,798 | 136 | Other |
| 13 | g2.com | 230,168 | 0.26% | 10,415 | 781 | Review Sites |
| 14 | gartner.com | 212,773 | 0.24% | 7,391 | 626 | Other |
| 15 | autotrader.com | 211,880 | 0.24% | 6,590 | 112 | Other |
| 16 | cargurus.com | 185,550 | 0.21% | 5,573 | 119 | Other |
| 17 | carfax.com | 171,799 | 0.20% | 3,830 | 117 | Other |
| 18 | play.google.com | 162,452 | 0.19% | 8,815 | 576 | App Stores |
| 19 | techradar.com | 160,921 | 0.18% | 2,929 | 865 | Tech Publications |
| 20 | dealerrater.com | 153,032 | 0.18% | 2,975 | 106 | Other |
| 21 | apps.apple.com | 152,369 | 0.17% | 8,998 | 608 | App Stores |
| 22 | yelp.com | 148,216 | 0.17% | 4,534 | 335 | Review Sites |
| 23 | clutch.co | 147,226 | 0.17% | 4,289 | 356 | Other |
| 24 | f6s.com | 144,575 | 0.17% | 5,895 | 781 | Other |
| 25 | caranddriver.com | 142,070 | 0.16% | 2,833 | 146 | Other |
| 26 | worldmetrics.org | 130,089 | 0.15% | 5,422 | 594 | Other |
| 27 | truecar.com | 121,595 | 0.14% | 2,871 | 110 | Other |
| 28 | caredge.com | 111,053 | 0.13% | 1,415 | 110 | Other |
| 29 | wifitalents.com | 101,277 | 0.12% | 5,124 | 600 | Other |
| 30 | tripadvisor.com | 100,207 | 0.11% | 3,958 | 162 | Review Sites |
| 31 | consumerreports.org | 93,268 | 0.11% | 2,053 | 280 | Review Sites |
| 32 | gitnux.org | 92,943 | 0.11% | 4,913 | 600 | Other |
| 33 | nerdwallet.com | 90,468 | 0.10% | 2,597 | 320 | Other |
| 34 | medium.com | 89,265 | 0.10% | 6,594 | 817 | Social / UGC |
| 35 | dqsglobal.com | 82,244 | 0.09% | 1,854 | 17 | Other |
| 36 | capitalone.com | 80,392 | 0.09% | 2,713 | 154 | Other |
| 37 | zipdo.co | 80,125 | 0.09% | 3,791 | 557 | Other |
| 38 | sciencedirect.com | 79,100 | 0.09% | 4,981 | 488 | Academic |
| 39 | toyota.com | 76,614 | 0.09% | 2,023 | 76 | Other |
| 40 | amazon.com | 74,883 | 0.09% | 5,174 | 312 | E-commerce |
| 41 | guideflow.com | 72,330 | 0.08% | 1,235 | 464 | Other |
| 42 | salesforce.com | 71,730 | 0.08% | 2,653 | 423 | Other |
| 43 | quora.com | 71,241 | 0.08% | 4,857 | 790 | Social / UGC |
| 44 | landroverusa.com | 69,482 | 0.08% | 266 | 37 | Other |
| 45 | gov.uk | 67,326 | 0.08% | 2,392 | 205 | Other |
| 46 | iseecars.com | 66,169 | 0.08% | 1,324 | 100 | Other |
| 47 | capterra.com | 64,784 | 0.07% | 3,286 | 504 | Review Sites |
| 48 | shopify.com | 63,747 | 0.07% | 2,298 | 276 | E-commerce |
| 49 | learn.microsoft.com | 63,001 | 0.07% | 3,445 | 299 | Official Docs |
| 50 | learn.g2.com | 62,044 | 0.07% | 775 | 498 | Review Sites |
Named source types cover a minority.
Named types cover a minority of the index
The classifier uses a hand-maintained domain map. Social sources account for 5.96% and reference sources for 1.4% of the current index, but “other” still holds 88.64%. That makes named category comparisons directional, not comprehensive.
“Best of” questions lead the named intents.
Prompts are assigned to rule-based intent groups. “Best of” represents 31.1% of classified prompt records, while 53.7% remain “other”. The index publishes aggregate prompt counts, never prompt text.
"Best of" and "top X" queries often surface review sites and curated lists. Reddit and user-generated content sites perform well here.
How the index has moved.
Daily points are plotted as observed. Missing snapshots remain gaps. Movement can reflect new citation behavior, a changed tracked panel, or both, so the chart is descriptive rather than causal.
Loading observed historical snapshots
The verified current snapshot and aggregate CSV remain available above. Historical points are loaded separately, and missing dates are never interpolated.
What this data can and can’t answer.
What this dataset can answer
Available for the 5,000 domains in the public slim export. The download applies a minimum of three contributing brands.
Available through a hand-maintained domain map, but most citations remain in “other”. Category shares are partial.
Available as aggregate prompt counts across six rule-based intent groups. Raw prompts are not published.
Daily aggregate snapshots show index movement. Changes can reflect both citation behavior and panel composition.
Provider attribution is not retained in this public aggregate, so the index does not claim model-by-model source differences.
The public index has citation appearances but no denominator for all responses, including responses with no citations.
This export holds domain and URL counts, not page classifications. A separate reviewed page-type study is linked below.
Prompt geography and language are not preserved in the public aggregate.
This is observational data. It cannot establish that a source trait caused a citation.
Method and evidence.
Methodology
Method and dataset coverage
AI Citation Index
Verified 2026-10-14
- Records
- 80,769,585 citation appearances, 3,687,821 unique URLs, 725,777 domains, and 1,928 tracked brands
- Dates
- 2025-10-03 to 2026-10-14
- Sampling
- Latest valid citation snapshot per tracked brand. Counts are appearance counts within those snapshots, not a census of all AI answers.
- Model scope
- The public aggregate does not retain provider-level attribution, so model comparisons and response-level citation rates are unavailable.
- Geography
- Prompt and response geography is not retained in the public aggregate.
- Privacy
- Downloads include aggregate domain rows seen across at least 3 contributing brands. Raw URLs and customer data are excluded.
- Not included
- Raw prompts, Raw responses, Customer identities, Account identifiers, Model-level denominators, Geography
Metric ledger
Open any metric to inspect its calculation, sample, scope, and limits.
- Definition
- Sum of citation appearance counts in the latest valid snapshot for each tracked brand.
- Numerator
- Not applicable
- Denominator
- Not applicable
- Sample
- 1,928 tracked brands
- Dates
- 2025-10-03 to 2026-10-14
- Model scope
- The public aggregate does not retain provider-level attribution, so model comparisons and response-level citation rates are unavailable.
- Geography
- Prompt and response geography is not retained in the public aggregate.
- Limits and confidence
- Not unique citations and not a census of all AI answers. A URL can appear more than once. Direct aggregate count from the verified public snapshot.
- Review
- Verified 2026-10-14. Reviewed by Mack Grenfell.
- Source files
- Open source Download data
Download the aggregate data
Aggregate, privacy-filtered files. No customer identities, prompts, account IDs, raw URLs, or absolute traffic volumes.
Definitions
- Citation appearance
- One observed instance of a source URL appearing in a tracked AI response snapshot. It is not necessarily a unique URL or a unique answer.
- Unique cited domain
- A normalized hostname with at least one citation appearance in the current brand snapshots.
- Verified snapshot
- A point-in-time value regenerated from an attributable public aggregate and checked against its numerator, denominator, and coverage metadata.
Update history
Live evidence refresh
Rebuilt the Citation Index, public rankings and AI Search Traffic Index evidence from 80,769,585 citation appearances, 9,231 ranked brands and 6,286 qualifying GA4 properties, to match the live pages.
Flagship evidence refresh
Rebuilt the three public research surfaces from 48,422,016 citation appearances and 4,928 qualifying GA4 properties.
Markdown experiment added
Added the randomized 9,033-page crawler experiment as a reviewed State of AI Search dataset.
Longitudinal citation study added
Added citation persistence and volatility findings with an explicit 177-day citation observation window.
Corrections
Citation headline and Wikipedia share
Removed the stale 1.3M citation and 17% Wikipedia claims. The page now resolves current values from the verified Citation Index and records the snapshot date.
Traffic loading values
Removed invented placeholder growth and source-share values. Loading and failed requests now render as unavailable.
Live-data description
Replaced “every number is live” with dataset-level status because several reviewed studies are point-in-time snapshots.
