What kind of source does each AI engine cite?

Each engine trusts a different kind of source. ChatGPT leans on government and associations (68% combined), Gemini on company sites (58%), and Google’s two AI surfaces cite YouTube more than any other site source. Copilot sends 28% of its citations to small single-topic sites, more than any other engine, and Claude sends 40% to comparison publishers, on few citations source.

Company sites are the largest single category overall (37% of all citations), led by Gemini source. Engines often quote the bank, insurer or software vendor directly rather than a third party describing it.

Social and video is a Google thing. YouTube is the most-cited site in both AI Overviews and AI Mode, where social and video platforms take 14% and 11% of citations; ChatGPT cites them 0% of the time source.

The seven source profiles on one chart

Each shape is one engine; each spoke is a category, scaled from 0 to the largest share on the chart. Hover or click an engine, in the legend or on the chart, to highlight it; hover or tap a point to read its value. The table under the chart holds the exact values source.

Do AI engines cite the same sites?

The engines barely agree on which sites to cite. 1,091 of 1,395 sites (78%) appear in only one engine’s answers, and one site, forbes.com, appears in six source. The closest pair, AI Overviews and AI Mode, share 8 of their 25 most-cited sites; ChatGPT shares at most 1 with any other engine source.

How concentrated is each engine?

Some engines spread citations wide, others concentrate. Copilot cited 399 different sites and its top 10 hold 9.9% of its citations; for AI Overviews the top 10 hold 26.1% source.

Does the country change which sources AI cites?

The same 60 questions were asked everywhere, in English for the US, UK, Australia and India and translated for the other six. The country changes how local the answer is. Japan (84%), Sweden (79%), Italy (70%) and Germany (65%) mostly get sites serving their own country; France (32%) and Spain (25%) do not source. Nor do the English-speaking markets outside the US: the UK 30%, Australia 29%, India 8% source.

Which engines cite local websites?

Japan has the highest or second-highest local share for six of the seven engines; Claude returned no citations for Japan source. India is the outlier: across engines 8% of citations go to Indian sites, so a question asked from India is mostly answered from sites serving other countries source.

Is it just where each platform’s users are?

A site might be cited less in a country simply because few people there use it. To test that, TIN measured the search audience by country of 57 of the most-cited international sites (Ahrefs organic search traffic, a proxy for users) and set it against where each site is cited source.

In the English-speaking markets audience goes with citations, but only partly: a site with a bigger local audience tends to be cited more there (rank correlation 0.42 in the US, 0.46 in the UK, 0.53 in Australia, 0.35 in India) source. In the non-English markets the international sites are barely cited at all, 44 citations across six countries, even where they have a real audience source. Questions asked in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Japanese rarely bring these international platforms into the answer, whatever their reach there.

YouTube gets 20.37% of its search audience from India, yet India accounts for 9 of its 49 citations; the UK, with 2.79%, accounts for 12 source. India shows the opposite pull for some sites. NerdWallet gets 0.71% of its search audience from India, yet it is cited 7 times for questions asked from India, more than in the UK and Australia combined source. NerdWallet, a US personal-finance site, is cited for Indian money questions with almost no Indian audience behind it.

Search audience and citations, site by site, for the ten most-cited measured sites. The first tab is the share of each site’s search audience in each country; the second is the citations it received for questions asked from that country. A dash means the country is outside the site’s top 40 audience countries.

The most-cited sites across all engines