There is a comfortable assumption behind most AI visibility work: publish enough good pages on your own domain and the engines will eventually quote them. We tested that assumption against our own category for three weeks, kept every source URL the engines returned, then opened each cited page to check whether we were on it. The assumption did not survive.
This report covers one category — AI visibility and answer-tracking software — measured against one brand we operate. That is a narrow base, and we say so up front rather than in a footnote. What makes it worth publishing is the verification step: we did not infer presence from the answers, we opened the cited pages and read them.
Measured 20 August – 11 September 2026 across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews.
Across 23 scans, the six engines returned source URLs resolving to 25 distinct third-party hosts. Grouped by what kind of page they are, the evidence set is not balanced — it is dominated by other people's comparison content.
| Source type | Hosts | Citations | Share | What these pages are |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roundups & comparisons | 18 | 1,061 | 51.5% | "Best X tools", "alternatives to Y" listicles on independent blogs |
| Community | 3 | 599 | 29.1% | Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, Quora answers |
| Video | 1 | 288 | 14.0% | YouTube, including Shorts |
| Independent articles | 3 | 113 | 5.5% | Single explainers, not listicles |
Two of those rows deserve attention because they are where budget rarely goes. A single host, Reddit, was cited 411 times — about twice the most-cited dedicated roundup site, and nearly four times our entire own-domain total. YouTube supplied 288 citations on its own, 14% of the third-party evidence, from one host. Neither is a place most software companies treat as a distribution channel for buying-stage content.
| Host | Type | Citations | Engines | On the page? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | Community | 411 | 5 | Absent |
| youtube.com | Video | 288 | 4 | Absent |
| getairefs.com | Roundup | 201 | 6 | Absent |
| linkedin.com | Community | 139 | 4 | Absent |
| integrate.io | Roundup | 93 | 3 | Absent |
| therankmasters.com | Roundup | 82 | 5 | Absent |
| tryanalyze.ai | Roundup | 79 | 4 | Absent |
| get-ryze.ai | Roundup | 79 | 4 | Not read |
| seoturtle.com | Roundup | 68 | 3 | Absent |
| getpassionfruit.com | Article | 58 | 4 | Absent |
| shanikaw.medium.com | Roundup | 53 | 5 | Absent |
| chosenly.com | Roundup | 50 | 3 | Not read |
Only one host in the whole set — getairefs.com — was cited by all six engines. It is a blog most people in this category have never heard of, and it outranks every vendor's own domain as a source of evidence about that category's products.
Averaging the six engines together hides the most actionable finding in the dataset. They differ enormously in how much outside material they will pull in.
| Engine | Hosts cited | Of 25 | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 23 | 92% | Most open. Third-party placement moves it fastest. |
| Claude | 22 | 88% | Nearly as broad; leans on roundups and community alike. |
| Google AI Overviews | 17 | 68% | Broad, but weighted to established publishers. |
| Grok | 15 | 60% | Mid-range; noticeably fond of community threads. |
| Gemini | 8 | 32% | Narrow. Concentrates on a handful of large hosts. |
| ChatGPT | 3 | 12% | Most closed. Third-party work barely reaches it. |
This matters for sequencing. If the goal is to be cited in Perplexity or Claude, getting onto the roundups and threads in the table above is the direct route, and it is measurable within weeks. If the goal is ChatGPT specifically, that route is mostly closed — it cited three outside hosts in three weeks — and the work is slower and more structural. Selling those two as the same engagement is how AEO retainers lose money.
We publish on our own domain too, and it is fair to ask what that produced. Across the same period the engines cited our own pages 106 times, against 2,061 for everyone else's.
| Page format | Citations | Share of own | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comparison pages /compare/* | 58 | 55% | "X alternatives", head-to-head pages |
| Homepage | 18 | 17% | Cited as an entity reference |
| Pricing page | 11 | 10% | Engines quote published prices directly |
| Guide articles /learn/* | 14 | 13% | The largest library on the site, the smallest return |
| Product docs | 5 | 5% | Developer-facing pages |
That last row is the one that cost us most to learn. The guide library is the biggest content investment on the site, produced steadily and to a consistent standard, and it returned 14 citations — 0.7% of the total evidence set. The comparison pages, a much smaller and less loved body of work, returned four times as many. Engines quote pages that resolve a decision, not pages that explain a topic.
On this evidence, the ranking of effort for a company trying to enter generated answers in a competitive software category is: get onto the third-party roundups engines already read; publish comparison and pricing pages that state real figures; participate honestly in the community threads that carry 29% of the evidence; and only then expand the owned guide library. We had that order close to backwards.
The engine-coverage and pricing side of this question is covered in AI visibility tools compared, built strictly from vendors' own published pricing pages. The mechanism behind the ranking-versus-citation gap is in From SEO to AEO. If you are packaging this as a service, the agency playbook covers scoping and the traps.
The useful output is not the score. It is the list of specific third-party pages that already decide your category's answers, and whether you are on them. That list is different for every business, and it is the part you can act on this quarter.
Talk to us about a measurement