Featured AI Citation Report, June-August 2026

Domain

A website, identified by its address (for example, forbes.com or reddit.com). We count domains when we talk about how many websites appear in the study.

Domain Authority (DA)

Moz’s 0–100 score for how much web authority a domain has. A third-party SEO metric, not something AI engines use themselves.

Source

A domain that an AI engine draws information from when answering a question. The source is where the information comes from, not the answer itself.

Citation

Each instance of a source appearing in an AI answer. A citation points to where information came from, not what the answer is. If forbes.com appears in 40 answers, that is 1 domain, 1 source, and 40 citations.

1. 34.5%

   A third of citations come from low-authority domains

   34.5% of all 22,881 citations pointed to a domain scoring under DA 40, and 13.2% pointed to domains under DA 20.

2. 53.9%

   Most cited domains are small

   Counting each domain once, 53.9% of the 11,499 domains AI search drew from score under DA 40, and the median domain scores just 37. But counting each citation instead, the median rises to DA 56 because a small number of large domains are cited repeatedly. Most websites are small, but the websites that get cited repeatedly tend to be larger.

3. 76%

   There is no shortlist to get on

   76% of the domains cited appeared exactly once across the entire study. The 100 most-cited domains account for under a quarter of all citations, and even the top 1,000 account for less than half. A fixed list of twenty big-name domains does not describe where AI search draws its answers from.

4. 78.5%

   Most brands do not appear in AI answers

   Of the 378 brands audited across 344 industries, 78.5% did not appear in the AI-generated answer to a single buying question in their category. Only 6.7% of the 1,983 questions tested included the brand in the answer at all.

5. 92.6%

   Your own domain is rarely a source

   92.6% of the brands audited never had their own domain appear as a citation in an AI answer about their category. Content from the brands’ own websites accounted for just 1.7% of classified citations — competitor domains were cited 13× more often.

6. 9.2%

   YouTube and Reddit are the two biggest single sources

   YouTube and Reddit together account for 9.2% of all citations in the study (YouTube 5.5%, Reddit 3.7%). The ten most-cited user-generated platforms collectively account for 11.7% of all citations, with YouTube and Reddit alone making up 9.2%.

The distribution is bimodal. There is a hard spike at the very top — 31.2% of citations go to DA 80+ giants — and a long, dense floor below DA 40 worth another 34.5%. The middle is thin, which is exactly where most brands’ owned content and mid-tier press coverage sits.

AI citation is extraordinarily long-tailed. 22,881 citations were spread across 11,499 different domains, and 76% of those domains were cited exactly once. Coverage climbs slowly, not sharply — there is no small set of domains that unlocks visibility.

Editorial coverage dominates, and brand-owned content is almost invisible at 1.7%. A brand’s own domain is the least likely thing to be cited about that brand — competitors are cited 13× more often.