We Analyzed 107 Million AI Answers. Here’s Where Each Industry’s Citations Actually Come From via @sejournal, @trendos_com
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Gintare Rimolaityte August 27, 2026 ⋅ 11 min read Gintare Rimolaityte COO & Co - Founder at Trendos Bio Follow 574 READS Editorial Reviewed: Jennifer McDonald Editorial Reviewed This post was sponsored by Trendos. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Every AI answer is assembled from a small set of sources the engine leans on for that question. Which sources make the cut is not fixed. It shifts from one industry to the next. So if you want AI to recommend your brand, the place to start is knowing which sources it pulls from in your market. We looked at 107 million AI answers this year and pulled the top 10 citation sources for three industries (IT & solutions services, consumer goods, and communication services) across the four engines search marketers watch most: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Then we sorted every cited domain into three groups: community and user generated content (Reddit, YouTube, forums), brand and retail (Amazon, vendor sites, product pages), and independent editorial and reference (media, review directories, Wikipedia). That gives a clear picture of where your effort pays off. It depends on what you sell, and plenty of brands are working on the wrong group of sources. Community and user generated content makes up almost exactly half of the leading citations in all three industries. Not high in one category and low in another, but close to 50% across the board. Figures show the average share of each engine’s top 10 citation sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, weighted equally across engines. Rows are rounded and may not total 100. Community content & user generated content (UGC) is content that is created by people in public, and typically, content is created for: Brand, retail & owned sources refer to commercial surfaces that a company or seller controls. These include first party sites and marketplace listings, such as Amazon, price comparison resources. Independent editorial & reference sources are third parties that have no stake in the sale. These are sources that span press, Wikipedia, and B2B directories. Reddit, YouTube, and forums sit under every category. Whether you sell enterprise software or car wax, public conversation between real people makes up about half of the leading citations. If your brand is absent from those threads, you are missing from half the sources AI reaches for. The interesting half is the other one, where the three industries stop looking alike. In IT and solutions services, your homepage will not carry you; third party proof will. Getting a feel for how AI engines decide what to cite tends to separate the brands that get recommended from the ones that get skipped. Brand owned sources, such as your web pages, all but disappear at 2%, the lowest of the three industries by far, while independent editorial and reference climbs to 47%. Much of that is B2B review directories: Clutch, G2, GoodFirms, Gartner, SourceForge, and Slashdot. Ask AI to recommend a software vendor and it does not take the vendor’s word for it. It goes looking for outside validation. That rewards very different work than consumer goods does. Claim and complete your profiles on the directories that matter in your niche, starting with G2, Clutch, and Gartner. Most of the work here sits on other people’s platforms: Earn current reviews on those profiles, because a strong directory listing is a source AI quotes directly. Pursue earned coverage in trade media (the PCMags and TechRadars of your category), which sit right alongside the directories in the citation lists. Communication services leans public. Community and user generated content leads at 51%, independent editorial and reference follows at 40%, and brand and retail is lowest at 10%. Reddit is the top source in three of the four engines here, and Wikipedia leads one engine’s entire list. Media names recur throughout, alongside entertainment reference sites. This is a category where public reputation, press coverage, and a solid encyclopedic presence feed the answer more than any page you publish yourself. For a telecom or media brand, almost everything that matters is earned, not published: Consumer goods is the outlier. Once you set community aside, brand, retail, and owned sources take almost all of what remains (46% of the leading citations), while independent editorial nearly vanishes at 4%. There is very little room for third party media in the answer. The engines split on this. Gemini’s consumer goods list is led by Amazon storefronts and specialist vendor sites, while Google AI Overviews puts YouTube and Reddit on top for the same industry. So the engine, as much as the product, decides whether your listing or your reviews get quoted. If you sell physical products, the work is mostly on your own surfaces. Audit your marketplace listings first. Titles, bullet points, specs, and reviews are the citation for several engines, so treat them as answer copy, not only as product copy. Fill the review gap. Structured, current reviews on your product pages and on Amazon feed the answer more than a blog post will. Build the second front on YouTube and Reddit, where the rest of the answer comes from. In consumer goods, your commercial surfaces carry the load. Get them clean and complete before you write another blog post. Averages hide how differently each engine behaves. The makeup of a top 10 depends as much on the engine as on the industry. “Optimize for AI search” is several jobs, not one. Ranking in Google AI Overviews comes down to YouTube and Reddit. For retail heavy results, it is your product and marketplace pages. For the more editorial engines, it is Wikipedia and the trade press. Same brand, different playbook each time. Across all four engines, Reddit lands in the top three citation sources for every one of the three industries, and it is the single most cited source in more than half of those cases. No other domain comes close to that consistency.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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