What AI Engines Actually Cite When Buyers Ask Who To Hire

A no-answer is an engine returning no answer text for a question. We exclude those before counting, because an engine that did not answer cannot have cited anything. In this run there were none, so the exclusion changed nothing. Answers that returned text but no source list are kept and counted, and section 06 reports them.

The question set is our own: 100 questions a buyer would actually type when looking for an AEO, GEO or AI visibility provider, spread across nine segments. Two shares get reported for most figures. Share of answers uses a denominator of 500, one question on one engine. Share of cited links uses a denominator of 1,969, every individual source link the engines returned.

Not one review directory appears in the top 25. Our own domain, sourcerankai.com, sits at 21 with 8 answers; we report it rather than quietly dropping it, because this is our own question set and we are one of the vendors the engines are choosing between.

Community is Reddit, Quora and forum platforms. Social and video is LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and Medium. Review directory is the nine sites listed in section 03. News is Yahoo, Forbes, Search Engine Land and PR Newswire. Docs and standards is Google developer and support documentation, schema.org, OpenAI documentation, arXiv and government domains. Vendor or agency site is the residual: 887 commercial sites belonging to agencies, tools and software vendors.

Counted at the registrable domain, so content subdomains such as learn.g2.com and news.designrush.com roll into their parent. One further directory, getapp.com, was cited once; on a wider definition that includes it the total becomes 11 links and 7 answers, 1.4%.

Against a denominator of 500 answers, the eight named directories are 1.2%. Against a denominator of 1,969 cited links, they are 0.5%. Capterra, Sortlist, Trustpilot and TrustRadius were not cited a single time in any of the 500 answers.

This does not mean directory profiles are worthless. They still get human traffic, and a profile can feed the reviews and third party mentions an engine reads elsewhere. It does mean that on this question set, on this date, an AI answer engine deciding who to recommend almost never reached for one. Our own read of what actually earns the citation is on the AEO agency comparison.

The combined row counts each answer once even when it cited two of the three, which is why 91 is less than 40 plus 32 plus 32.

Three consumer platforms were cited in 91 of 500 answers and touched 60 of the 100 questions. Reddit alone was the single most cited domain in the entire run. An engine synthesising a hiring recommendation is reading what people said in public, on a forum, on a profile, on video, far more than it is reading a structured vendor listing.

Half the citations come from 133 different places. Two thirds of the domains that got cited got cited once and never again. That shape argues against any strategy built on placing yourself on a handful of high authority pages, and in favour of being consistently citable across a wide surface, because there is no small set of sources to buy your way onto.

120 of 500 answers, 24.0%, carried no source list. Gemini accounts for 100 of those: in this run it answered every question and attached a source list to none of them. That is a property of what the engine exposes and what our collector could capture on the day, not evidence that Gemini invented its answers.

This matters for anyone quoting a single run, including us. Every domain share on this page is computed over the 380 answers that did carry sources, then expressed against the full 500 so the reader can see the real denominator. A vendor who quietly drops the sourceless answers from the denominator will report the same run with materially higher shares. If an AI visibility statistic does not tell you how many of its answers had no sources, you cannot tell which denominator it used, and the number is not checkable.

In the agencies segment, community and social and video tied on 5 links each; community is shown as runner up. Segment link counts sum to 1,969 and segment question counts sum to 100.

Vendor and agency sites are the most cited kind in all nine segments, never below 80% of that segment's links. What moves is second place. In the general and agencies segments it is community, meaning Reddit. In B2B SaaS it is social and video. In the six remaining verticals, including financial services, healthtech, manufacturing and logistics, second place is documentation and standards: Google's own developer docs, schema.org, government sources. In a regulated or technical vertical the engine reaches for a specification, not a forum post. We have since run the same cut across ten companies in ten different industries, where the swing is far larger than it is between segments of one question set: the source mix by industry.

• +Review directories were cited in 6 of 500 answers, 1.2%, and in 10 of 1,969 links, 0.5%. Capterra, Sortlist, Trustpilot and TrustRadius were never cited.
• +Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube were cited in 91 of 500 answers, 18.2%, touching 60 of the 100 questions. Reddit was the single most cited domain.
• +Vendor and agency websites supplied 1,684 of 1,969 links, 85.5%, and were the most cited kind in all nine segments.
• +Citations are long tailed: 914 domains, 133 needed to reach the first half of all links, 608 cited exactly once.
• +120 of 500 answers carried no source list, 100 of them from Gemini, which is why the denominator has to be published alongside any AI citation statistic.