What 1.06m citations taught us about AI answers
Written by Tom Fry. Reviewed by Claire Williamson. Updated .
Your competitors' websites are the biggest source of AI answers about your market. Of 1,064,000 citations across our runs to June 2026, 58.1% went to competitor or peer-vendor sites. The brand's own site took 15.5%. Editorial press took 3.4%, which may upset those of us who came up through PR.
Three things we now do differently
We treat the homepage as a cited page. Across three recent runs, 7,441 citations in all, bare homepages took 26%. Blog and guide URLs took 11%, and “best” or “top” lists took 8%. So the homepage carries the one-sentence description and the category noun, whatever else it does.
We publish comparisons that include competitors. DeltaV measured comparison pages at 1.87 citations per retrieval against a 1.29 average. A vendor's own list, with its place disclosed, is a citation source in its own right. Clarity ranks itself first and says so, and that page drew 164 answers in one run.
We report an earned rank. A rank built on your own site is fragile. Resonance fell from 9th to 14th in week 6 once we excluded answers that read its own pages. Most of its gains came from its own pages, and we say so on our results page.
What it does not tell you
These citations come from programmes we chose to run, mostly for B2B technology companies in English. A consumer brand, or a market with strong official bodies, will look different. On a Cyber Essentials panel, official pages took 293 citations in one week, and no vendor will displace those.
The direction holds in the studies we trust. Mentions elsewhere predict visibility better than links do: Ahrefs found YouTube mentions correlating at about 0.74 across 75,000 brands, against about 0.3 for Domain Rating. So the page gets you retrieved, and other people's sites get you recommended.