AI RanklyWhat AI engines cite when buyers ask about AI visibility tools
Published September 9, 2026 · By the AI Rankly team
65,653 citations from seven AI engines over 60 days, broken down by source type, domain and vendor. YouTube and Reddit outrank every vendor site, and 80% of citations go to third-party roundups rather than to the tools themselves.
- Four in five citations (80%) point at third-party pages, mostly "best AI visibility tools" roundups. Vendors' own sites collect only 10% of citations in their own category.
- YouTube (2,257 citations) and Reddit (1,725) are the two most-cited domains, ahead of every vendor. LinkedIn is fourth.
- Among vendors, Semrush is cited most (24% of vendor citations), followed by SE Ranking (19%), Profound (17%), Otterly (13%) and LLM Pulse (12%).
- Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok and Claude cited all 25 of the most-cited roundup pages. ChatGPT cited 18 of them, the fewest of any engine.
- Google's own AI optimization guide is the seventh most-cited third-party page (457 citations) even though it names no tools.
What we measured
AI Rankly tracks the AI visibility and AEO/GEO toolscategory for its own brand, the same way it tracks any customer's. For 60 days ending September 8, 2026, 149buyer prompts (for example "best tools to track brand mentions in ChatGPT") ran every day on 7 engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Each full answer was stored, and every URL the engine cited was extracted and grouped by domain and by source type. That produced 65,653 citations. The pipeline is described in full on the methodology page.
Where citations go, by source type
Four in five citations point at third-party pages, and most of those are "best AI visibility tools" roundups. The vendors being recommended collect a tenth of the citations in their own category. If you sell in this category, the pages that decide whether you are named are mostly pages you do not own.
The 30 most-cited domains
YouTube and Reddit are cited more than any vendor. LinkedIn is fourth. Among vendor sites, Semrush leads, then Profound, SE Ranking, Otterly and LLM Pulse. Below them sits a long tail of independent roundups, each cited a few hundred times.
Citation share by vendor
Of the citations that went to a vendor's own site, this is how they split. AI Rankly is included at the bottom: this is our own category, and our own number is the honest one.
Do the engines cite the same pages?
We took the 25 most-cited roundup pages in the category and checked which engines cited each one at least once. Four engines cited all 25. ChatGPT cited 18, the narrowest set, which is consistent with it drawing on a smaller pool of retrieved pages per answer than the Google surfaces or Perplexity.
| Engine | Top-25 pages cited |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 25 of 25 |
| Google AI Mode | 25 of 25 |
| Grok | 25 of 25 |
| Claude | 25 of 25 |
| Perplexity | 24 of 25 |
| Gemini | 24 of 25 |
| ChatGPT | 18 of 25 |
What this means if you sell in this category
Being named in AI answers here is mostly decided off-site. The roundup pages above are the ones to be listed on, and YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn are worth more citations than any vendor blog. Your own site still matters for what engines say about you once you are named (pricing, positioning, facts), but it is not what gets you into the list.
Cite as: AI Rankly Research, "What AI engines cite when buyers ask about AI visibility tools", September 9, 2026. https://www.airankly.io/research/what-ai-engines-cite-for-ai-visibility-tools-september-2026. Data licensed CC BY 4.0; a link back to this page is the only condition.