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AI Citation Studies

type: summaryconfidence: lowupdated: 2026-11-04sources: 16

Key Points

Almost every study here is published by a company that sells AI-visibility, SEO or content software. Each row states publisher, date, sample and a vendor-interest note. Numbers are never merged across rows: "AI Overview citations" (Google's product, per query), "AI assistant citations" (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity) and "ChatGPT retrieval" are different populations.

Table

Study Publisher (date) Sample / method Finding Vendor interest
76% of AIO citations from top 10 Ahrefs (21 Jul 2025) 1.9M citations from 1M AI Overviews; top 3 citations per response 76.10% of cited pages ranked top 10; 9.50% ranked 11-100; 14.40% outside top 100. Median rank of the three citations 3 Sells Brand Radar
Update: 38% Ahrefs (2 Mar 2026) 863K keyword SERPs, 4M AIO URLs, Brand Radar data, improved parsing (not like-for-like with the 2025 study), after AIOs moved to Gemini 3 (Jan 2026) 37.9% of cited URLs in the first 10 SERP blocks (blue links only: 37.1%); 31.2% in 11-100; 31.0% beyond. 18.2% of non-ranking citations were YouTube (5.6% of all AIO URLs) Same
12% overlap, AI assistants Ahrefs (11 Aug 2025; data collected early July 2025) 15,000 long-tail prompts to ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, compared with Google and Bing top 10 About 12% of cited links in Google top 10, but that is a mean of five figures that includes Perplexity's 28.6% (the other assistants are around 8%, so "12% for ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot" overstates them); Bing top-10 overlap about 10%; about 80% did not rank anywhere for the original query Same
AI Mode vs AI Overviews Ahrefs (15 Dec 2025; Sept 2025 US data) 540,000 query pairs (citations) and 730,000 pairs (content similarity) Same URLs only 13.7% of the time (16.3% for top 3 citations); Jaccard similarity of response text 0.16 Same
ChatGPT fan-out Ahrefs (12 Oct 2026) 66.6M logged-out free ChatGPT responses, 15M fan-out queries, Aug-Sep 2026 14.4% of responses contained fan-out queries (about 1.6 each); 6.8% of fan-outs used site:; 75.9% of common site: targets were brand sites; Reddit citations down 88% in six months (separate citation data) Same
Schema test Ahrefs (11 May 2026) 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD (Aug 2025-Mar 2026) vs 4,000 matched controls; 30 days before/after; difference-in-differences No meaningful lift: AI Overviews -4.6%, AI Mode +2.4%, ChatGPT +2.2% (the last two indistinguishable from noise). Separately, across 6M URLs, cited pages were about 3x more likely to have JSON-LD Same
AIO one-year review BrightEdge (undated page; data to Feb 2026) Generative Parser over tracked keywords; nine industries AIO presence about 31% (Feb 2025) to about 48% (Feb 2026); average height about 1,200 px; about 17% of AIO-cited sources in organic top 10, flat over a Feb-Jul 2025 window (about 49% to 53% ranking anywhere in the top 100); by industry Healthcare 24.0%, Finance 11.3%, eCommerce 13.4% Sells AI Catalyst
AIO citations vs organic BrightEdge (18 Sep 2025; data May 2024-Sep 2025) Nine industries Overlap with organic rankings grew from 32.3% to 54.5%; Healthcare 75.3%, Education 72.6%, E-commerce 22.9% Same
AIO CTR v3 Seer Interactive (Apr 2026) 53 brands, 5.47M queries, 2.43B organic impressions, Jan 2025-Feb 2026; OLS projection to Mar 2026 Organic CTR on AIO queries fell to 1.3% (Dec 2025), rose to 2.4% (Feb 2026); no-AIO queries 3.8%. Cited brands got +120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited, still 38% below no-AIO. AIO shown on 36% of informational, 8% commercial, 5% transactional queries Agency; sells search services
Fan-Out Effect AirOps (undated landing page) 16,851 queries, 353,799 pages, 10 industries, each query sent to ChatGPT 3 times Page at retrieval position 0 cited 58% of the time vs 14% at position 10; strong heading match 41% vs 29%; JSON-LD 38.5% vs 32.0%; no positive link between domain authority or backlinks and citation Sells an AEO content platform
Do engines cite the same sources? Writesonic (22 Jul 2026) 161,286 prompts, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AIO; domain-level Jaccard 3.8% of domains cited by all four (on the 70,879 prompts where all four returned citations); pairwise 0.119 to 0.237; Perplexity-AIO highest Sells citation tracking
5-engine overlap Wellows (29 Jul 2026, updated 6 Aug) 22.7M citations, 1.15M questions, Jan-Jun 2026, 531,889 questions cited by all five engines 79.6% of sources on one engine only; 0.31% on all five; same page 6.8%, same brand 30.3%. Vendor's own random-baseline test weakened part of two claims Sells tracking
Domain authority Wellows (5 Aug 2026, updated 2 Oct) 20.5M citations, 386,000 domains, 42 markets, 8 Mar-31 Jul 2026 47.9% of citations from domains below DA 40; 301 DA 90+ domains took 17.0% Same
Citation economy OtterlyAI (Jan-Feb 2026 data) 1M+ citations, ChatGPT, Perplexity, AIO Brand share of citations: AIO 59.8%, ChatGPT 44.7%, Perplexity 28.9%; 73% of sites with technical barriers to AI crawlers. Internal conflict on the 52.5% figure Sells tracking
Most-cited domains Semrush (10 Nov 2025) 230K prompts, 13 weekly snapshots 14 Jul-12 Oct 2025, 100M+ citations, ChatGPT search, AI Mode, Perplexity ChatGPT cited Reddit in about 60% of responses in early Aug, about 10% by mid-Sep; Wikipedia about 55% to under 20%; AI Mode and Perplexity more stable (Perplexity's Reddit share declined slightly) Sells AI visibility toolkit
ChatGPT citation factors SE Ranking (24 Nov 2025) 129,000 domains, 216,524 pages, 20 niches Referring domains, traffic, content freshness and Reddit/Quora presence correlate with citation; FAQ schema averaged 3.6 citations vs 4.2 without; llms.txt negligible Sells a ChatGPT tracker

Conflicts to keep visible

  • How much AIO citation overlaps the top 10. Ahrefs: 76% (Jul 2025) then 38% (Mar 2026); Ahrefs says Gemini 3 and fan-out "may" explain it, and it also improved its parsing between the two. BrightEdge: about 17% top-10 overlap (Feb-Jul 2025 window, one-year report) and 54.5% "from organic rankings" (to Sept 2025) in another. The 54.5% is not a top-10 figure: that page says "Only 16.7% of citations come from top 10 results" and that growth comes from pages ranking 21-100; the one-year report shows about 53% ranking in the top 100. The 54.5% page does not state its cutoff. Wiki reading.
  • Structured data. AirOps reports +6.5 percentage points for JSON-LD pages; Ahrefs' before/after test found no lift; SE Ranking found no gain for FAQ schema. Observational comparison (AirOps, Ahrefs' 3x) and a matched test answer different questions.
  • Authority. SE Ranking reports high referring-domain sites 3.5x more likely cited by ChatGPT; AirOps found no positive link between authority and citation; Wellows found both small-site entry and large-site concentration.
  • ChatGPT retrieval. Ahrefs originally said 14.4% of responses "searched the web", then corrected to "contained fan-out queries" in October 2026; the fetched copy's headings still say ChatGPT "answers 6 in 7 prompts without searching the web", so treat that framing as unreliable.
  • Manipulation resilience. Semrush's Head of Organic and AI Visibility attributes the Reddit/Wikipedia drop to ChatGPT becoming "more resilient to manipulation"; this is opinion, not a tested result.

Relevant Concepts

Source Metadata

Item Detail
Publishers Ahrefs, BrightEdge, Seer Interactive, AirOps, Writesonic, Wellows, OtterlyAI, Semrush, SE Ranking
Date range Studies published Jul 2025 to Oct 2026
Independence None independent of a software or services vendor. Raw data is not published in the gathered pages
Replication No study was replicated by another in the gathered sources
Population note Google AI Overviews, multi-assistant citations and ChatGPT-only studies are separate rows; do not average them
Gaps AirOps report date; Google's own statements on citation selection are in ai search retrieval and fan out, not here; BrightEdge methodology definitions