
Same question, different sources: how much AI citations change between checks
Ask an AI the same buyer question repeatedly and the cited sources shift. We measured how much they change between checks, and it turns on the engine and the question.
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Ask an AI the same buyer question repeatedly and the cited sources shift. We measured how much they change between checks, and it turns on the engine and the question.

We logged about 26,400 AI answers across five assistants. Brands were cited or named in only 16 percent. Here is the per-engine split and why.

We classified 151,000 sources five AI engines actually cited. The open web dominates every engine, but the leans differ: YouTube on Google AI Mode, forums on ChatGPT, almost neither on Claude.

We analyzed almost 100,000 AI citations across five platforms. Of the outside sources AI cites about a brand, around 40 percent are its competitors.

An experiment across about 16,400 AI answers and 127,198 source citations from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. The five engines agree on just 2.7% of sources, and Gemini cites three times more than ChatGPT.

Google Search is moving from links to answers, agents, and generated interfaces. That changes what web visibility means.

I ran an nginx probe against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and Manus to see what each assistant actually sends when it fetches your page. Real user-agents, real Accept headers, real vendor blind spots.