Research
where AI answers actually get their sources
When researchers audit which websites AI assistants actually cite, two things jump out. The citation economy is concentrated, with Wikipedia and Reddit taking outsized shares, and the platforms disagree with each other far more than most marketers assume. Both facts should change how a business spends its visibility effort.
a concentrated, lopsided economy
Multiple 2025 and 2026 citation studies, including Semrush's three-month analysis of AI citations and 5W's citation source index, find a familiar pattern: encyclopaedic and community sources dominate. Wikipedia takes a large share of ChatGPT's citations, Reddit takes an even larger share of Perplexity's, and professional platforms like LinkedIn have been climbing the tables. The exact percentages vary by study and month, and these are industry measurements rather than peer-reviewed ones, but the concentration itself is consistent everywhere.
the platforms barely overlap
The same research finds that only a small minority of domains get cited by more than one platform. An engine that leans on community discussion and an engine that leans on encyclopaedic pages are building different maps of the web. Practical consequence: checking your visibility on one assistant tells you little about the others, and a strategy tuned to a single platform quietly forfeits the rest.
what a normal business does with this
You cannot become Wikipedia, and you should not spam Reddit, which communities punish and platforms increasingly detect. What you can do is be present, honestly, where the engines already look: a presence on the professional platforms rising in the tables, genuine participation where your customers actually discuss your category, and above all a consistent story across every third-party surface that describes you, from directories to reviews to press. Your own site supplies the quotable answer; the wider web supplies the corroboration that makes an engine confident enough to use it.
the honest catch
Citation-share studies measure different platforms, prompts, countries and months, and their numbers move violently, with one tracker recording a platform's Reddit share collapsing and rebounding within a season. Hold the specific figures loosely. The durable lessons are concentration, divergence between engines, and the compounding value of being consistently described across sources you do not own.
Common questions
Should we invest in Reddit and forums?
- Participate where you have something real to contribute, and never astroturf. One genuinely helpful answer thread outperforms a hundred planted mentions, and the planted kind now carries platform and reputational risk.
Does Wikipedia matter for a small business?
- Directly, rarely; most small firms do not merit an article and forcing one backfires. Indirectly, yes: the citation habit rewards the same verifiability everywhere, so build the evidence trail on surfaces you can legitimately occupy.
How do we track this for our own brand?
- Ask each major assistant your buyers' questions monthly, log who gets named and which sources are cited, and note which platform cites what. The divergence you will see is the strategy telling you where to show up.
Tom Claydon
Co-founder of Nudge
Ask Tom anything about search, he answers on WhatsApp.