Most agencies are cited, but barely

We counted citations across all AI platforms in the Ahrefs AI index (AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok), as of 2026-09-26.

The mean is 124.9 and the median 3: a handful of very large counts pull the average far above what a typical agency gets, which is why this page reports medians.

A small group takes almost everything

The 24 most-cited agencies (the top 10%) hold 78.4% of all citations. The top five alone hold 43.8%.

Most of the top of the list is large IT-services firms that list AI first on their homepage. That is a feature of the population rule, not an editorial choice: they qualify on the same mechanical test as a five-person n8n shop.

ChatGPT is the hardest room to get into

AI citations follow search authority

We fixed four off-site measures in advance and compared them with AI citations. All four move with citations; ranking keywords most closely.

n is 161 cited and 77 uncited. These are rank correlations across agencies on one date: they say which agencies tend to have both, not that one produces the other.

Agency case studies are common, and thin

For every agency we opened the first case study in its own listed order and checked three things a buyer (or a model) needs to trust it: a named client, a number with a unit, and a date on the page. 235 of 238 sites could be read; the rest were unreachable or hid their list behind scripts.

The date is the item most often missing. A result with no date cannot be placed in time, which matters for anything a reader might try to reuse.

Case studies and citations, compared like for like (exploratory)

Agencies with a case-study page are cited more overall: 128 of 170 (75.3%) against 30 of 65 (46.2%), with median citations of 15 and 0. But bigger, stronger domains are also more likely to publish case studies. Splitting the 235 readable agencies into three Domain Rating bands of roughly equal size:

Within each band the gap is small, and in the lowest band it runs the other way. This check was not in the pre-registered plan, so it is labelled exploratory: it is a reason not to read finding 5 as advice, not a result on its own.

Size and directory

Groups with fewer than 10 agencies are shown but not interpreted. The directory an agency came from mostly tracks its size: Clutch and UiPath listings skew to larger firms; Zapier and n8n listings skew to small specialist shops.

Clutch’s list order can reflect paid placement, so we recorded Clutch’s own Premier label for every Clutch listing. 26 of the 30 Clutch agencies carried it; with only 4 without it, the comparison is too small to read.

Agencies cited above their weight

Across the 155 agencies with a Domain Rating under 40, the median agency has 1 AI citation. These eight sit far above that. They are worth studying one by one, which this dataset alone cannot do.