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Which Website Is Cited the Most for AEO? I Ranked the Top 12 Using Data From 680 Million Citations

I kept getting asked the same question by clients, and I kept giving a fuzzy answer. So I went and pulled the actual numbers. Over the past few weeks I worked through seven independent citation studies covering more than 680 million individual AI citations, plus fresh monthly snapshots from Ahrefs Brand Radar, Peec AI, Semrush, Profound, BrightEdge, and OtterlyAI. What I found surprised me in a few places and confirmed what I suspected in others. Reddit is still the answer to the headline question, but the margin is narrower than the headlines suggest, and on two of the five major engines it is not even in first place. Below is the consolidated ranking, most-cited on top, with the raw numbers behind each position and what I would actually do about it if I were building an Answer Engine Optimization program from scratch this quarter.

By Pratigya Kafle
Which Website Is Cited the Most for AEO? I Ranked the Top 12 Using Data From 680 Million Citations

Why this question is harder than it looks

Before I hand you the list, I want to be honest about the messy part. There is no single agreed-upon metric for "most cited."

Different studies measure different things. Profound reports raw citation percentage across a full corpus. Ahrefs reports mention share, which is a domain's citations expressed as a percentage of the summed citations of the top sources. Semrush reports response coverage, meaning the share of prompts where a domain appears at least once. Those three numbers can point in three directions for the same website on the same day.

The academic framing helps here. The Princeton and IIT Delhi team that coined Generative Engine Optimization made this exact point in their KDD 2024 paper, arguing that ranking-based metrics from classic search simply do not transfer. They proposed position-adjusted word count and subjective impression instead, and demonstrated that their optimization methods could "boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses". (Aggarwal et al., KDD '24)

So when I built the ranking below, I weighted four things: cross-engine consistency, recency of the snapshot, size of the underlying dataset, and whether the study counted direct citations rather than retrieved-but-unused pages. That last filter matters more than people realize. ChatGPT surfaces only about 15% of the pages it actually retrieves as visible citations, so retrieval volume badly overstates real influence.

The consolidated ranking

Rank

Domain

ChatGPT mention share

Perplexity mention share

Cross-engine position

1

Reddit

16.8%

21.6%

#1 or #2 on every engine tested

2

YouTube

2.5%

20.8%

#1 on AI Overviews and AI Mode

3

Wikipedia

7.0%

6.3%

#1 on ChatGPT by top-source share

4

LinkedIn

1.1%

0.9%

~15% of AI Mode responses

5

Forbes

3.1%

1.2%

Top editorial domain overall

6

Amazon

Top 3 historically

3.6%

~4.0% on AI Overviews

7

G2

~1.1%

0.6%

B2B recommendation queries

8

Yelp

Low

0.9%

Local and hospitality queries

9

Facebook

1.4%

4.5%

Rising sharply on both

10

TechRadar

2.1%

1.1%

Consumer tech vertical

11

Medium

Low

0.8%

Post-2025 ChatGPT riser

12

Consumer Reports

3.7%

1.3%

Fastest-climbing reviewer

Mention share figures from Ahrefs Brand Radar, United States, all topics, September 2026 snapshot.

 

 

1. Reddit: still the single most-cited domain in AI search

Reddit takes the top slot, and it is not particularly close on aggregate.

Peec AI analyzed 30 million directly cited sources across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, and found Reddit ranked either first or second on every single engine they tested. (Peec AI, March 2026)

The Ahrefs September 2026 snapshot puts hard numbers on it. Reddit holds 16.8% mention share in ChatGPT across 810,887 distinct cited pages, and 21.6% in Perplexity across 892,114 pages. Ahrefs calls Perplexity's Reddit concentration the most concentrated top source of any assistant they measured.

Profound's longitudinal dataset of 680 million citations tells a similar story from a different angle. Within Perplexity's top ten sources, Reddit captured 46.7% of the share. Within Google AI Overviews' top ten, it took 21.0%. (Profound)

Here is the part most summaries skip. Reddit's position is volatile. Semrush tracked 230,000 prompts and over 100 million citations across thirteen weeks and watched ChatGPT's Reddit coverage fall from roughly 60% of prompt responses in early August 2025 to around 10% by mid-September. I asked myself whether that was a crawler issue. Semrush's own Head of Organic and AI Visibility, Sergei Rogulin, does not think so. He attributes it to "an attempt to avoid over-citing on certain websites" during answer generation. (Semrush)

What we do with this: we do not astroturf. Reddit blocks roughly 23 million spam views per day, and a banned account is worse than no account. We participate under verified identities in subreddits where our team genuinely has expertise, and we treat the karma-weighted comment as the citable unit.

2. YouTube: the fastest riser, and already #1 on Google's surfaces

If you asked me this question eighteen months ago I would have put YouTube fourth. Today it is a genuine co-leader, and inside Google's own answer surfaces it has already taken the crown.

BrightEdge found YouTube is cited roughly 200 times more than any other video platform, with Vimeo and TikTok both languishing at 0.1%. Average YouTube citation share across AI platforms sits near 20%, and 29.5% of Google AI Overviews cite YouTube. (Search Engine Land)

Ahrefs' September 2026 Perplexity data reinforces it: YouTube holds 20.8% mention share across 1,059,603 distinct cited pages, the highest distinct-page count of any domain in the entire dataset.

OtterlyAI ran the largest study on this specific question, analyzing more than 100 million AI citation instances across six platforms. Their headline finding inverts everything creators assume: "AI systems do not reward popularity, they reward reference value". (OtterlyAI)

The supporting numbers are remarkable. 40.8% of AI-cited YouTube videos had fewer than 1,000 views. About 36% had fewer than 15 likes. Roughly 35% of cited channels had under 10,000 subscribers. Subscriber count correlated with citation frequency at r = -0.03, which is statistical noise. The only variables that mattered were description length (r ≈ 0.31) and the presence of timestamps.

Long-form video accounts for 94% of YouTube AI citations. Shorts account for just 5.7%.

What we do with this: we audit existing video libraries before producing anything new. Peec AI's Tomek Rudzki puts the single highest-leverage fix bluntly, advising teams to "always review the auto-generated transcription before your video goes live". Engines read the transcript, not the visuals.

3. Wikipedia: the most-cited domain inside ChatGPT specifically

Wikipedia is third on aggregate and first on ChatGPT, depending on which denominator you use.

Profound's 680-million-citation dataset found Wikipedia accounted for 7.8% of ChatGPT's total citations and a dominant 47.9% share within ChatGPT's top ten sources. Ahrefs' September 2026 snapshot has it at 7.0% mention share, second only to Reddit.

Wikipedia is structurally different from every other entry on this list because it operates on two layers. It is a live retrieval target, and it is core pre-training corpus material. That means a Wikipedia page established before a model's knowledge cutoff is not merely a source the model might fetch, it is something the model already encodes as a parametric fact about your entity.

The catch is notability. Wikipedia's editorial guidelines reject most brand submissions, and paid or self-authored pages get deleted. There is no shortcut.

4. LinkedIn: the professional identity layer

LinkedIn ranked third in Peec AI's 30-million-source analysis, ahead of Wikipedia.

Semrush found Google AI Mode cited LinkedIn in nearly 15% of its responses, holding steady across the study window. Profound put LinkedIn at 13.0% of AI Overviews' top-ten source share. Notably, LinkedIn trended upward on all three engines in exactly the window where Reddit and Wikipedia collapsed on ChatGPT, which suggests engines redistribute citation weight rather than shrinking it.

Three LinkedIn content types get cited: Pulse articles, standard feed posts, and company page updates. Founder and executive posts about product news show up disproportionately.

5. Forbes: the highest-cited editorial publisher

Forbes is the only traditional publisher that reliably cracks the top five on every engine.

Profound recorded Forbes at 6.8% of ChatGPT's top-ten source share, 5.7% on AI Overviews, and 5.0% on Perplexity. Ahrefs' September 2026 snapshot has it at 3.1% mention share in ChatGPT, ranked fourth overall.

Semrush observed something sharper: after the September 2025 shift, Forbes doubled its number of ChatGPT responses containing a citation. When engines pulled back from user-generated content, editorial authority absorbed the slack.

6. Amazon: the commerce anchor

Amazon rarely appears in "top domains" headlines because most studies exclude retail, but the data does not support that exclusion.

Ahrefs' earlier analysis of 9.6 million ChatGPT queries placed Amazon third overall with 97,457 mentions, behind only Reddit and Wikipedia. The September 2026 Perplexity snapshot has it at 3.6% mention share across 105,853 cited pages. Inside Google AI Overviews it sits near 4.0%.

For anyone with a product catalog, Amazon listing hygiene is an AEO surface, not just a sales channel.

7. G2: the B2B software gatekeeper

G2 punches far above its traffic weight. Profound found it captured 6.7% of ChatGPT's top-ten source share, placing it fourth on that engine ahead of TechRadar and NerdWallet. Peec AI ranked it sixth overall and flagged that it appears prominently on Perplexity for B2B queries.

If you sell software, your G2 profile completeness and review recency are load-bearing AEO assets.

8. Yelp: the local query default

Yelp took 5.8% of Perplexity's top-ten share in Profound's dataset and ranked seventh in Peec AI's cross-engine list. Its citations cluster hard around local intent, restaurants, services, and "best in [city]" prompts.

9. Facebook: the surprising climber

Facebook is the entry where the studies disagree most, and I think that disagreement is itself the finding.

Ahrefs' September 2026 data shows Facebook at 4.5% mention share on Perplexity (fourth overall) and 1.4% on ChatGPT, where it climbed sixteen positions in a single month. Peec AI, meanwhile, notes Facebook blocks Perplexity's crawlers in its robots.txt.

Both can be true if Perplexity is citing Facebook URLs surfaced through a third-party index rather than direct crawl. Either way, a domain moving sixteen slots in thirty days tells you how unstable this leaderboard is.

10. TechRadar: the consumer tech specialist

TechRadar holds 2.1% mention share on ChatGPT and 5.5% of ChatGPT's top-ten share in Profound's dataset. In a narrower 17,551-citation study focused specifically on the AEO and GEO software category, TechRadar ranked second with 908 citations, behind only Wikipedia.

11. Medium: the post-shift beneficiary

Medium ranked ninth in Peec AI's list and appeared as one of the three biggest ChatGPT winners in Semrush's winners-and-losers analysis, alongside PR Newswire and Forbes. It sits at 3.9% of AI Overviews' top-ten share.

12. Consumer Reports: the fastest-climbing review authority

This is the entry I did not expect. Ahrefs' September 2026 ChatGPT snapshot places Consumer Reports third overall at 3.7% mention share, ahead of Forbes. Trustpilot climbed fourteen positions in the same month to 1.5%, and Tripadvisor climbed eight to 1.5%.

The pattern across all three is the same: independent, structured, comparative evaluation. Engines appear to weight third-party assessment over first-party claims.

Two clusters that did not make the numbered list but should worry you

The health and government tier is consolidating fast. Ahrefs' September 2026 ChatGPT top fifty now includes PMC NCBI (2.4%), PubMed (1.8%), Healthline (2.5%), Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, MedlinePlus, ScienceDirect, FDA, and CDC. In regulated verticals, institutional sources are crowding out commercial ones.

The anonymous long tail is real. Two domains I had never heard of, engineerfix.com (Domain Rating 59) and legalclarity.org (DR 76), both hold 2.8% ChatGPT mention share, outranking Business Insider, Wired, and LinkedIn. In the AEO-category study, 54.5% of all citations pointed to domains outside the top 100. High domain authority is not the gate it used to be.

What the aggregate pattern actually tells us

Three findings changed how I run programs.

First, concentration is extreme but engine-specific. The top fifteen domains capture roughly 68% of consolidated citation share across engines. Yet only about 11% of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity. A domain cited by ChatGPT has roughly a one-in-nine chance of also being cited by Perplexity. Single-platform optimization leaves most of the landscape invisible.

Second, earned media does the heavy lifting. Roughly 84% of AI citations come from earned third-party sources, while a brand's own website accounts for only 5% to 10% of what engines reference. Paid and advertorial content sits near 0.3%.

Third, format beats authority more often than we admit. A study of 75,000 AI answers and over a million citations found listicles took 21.9% of citations, articles 16.7%, and product pages 13.7%, together making up 52% of all AI citations. (Search Engine Land) Listicles captured 40.9% of commercial-intent citations. Critically, 80.9% of cited listicles were third-party, not self-promotional.

And the old proxy is failing. Only about 38% of AI Overview citations now come from pages ranking in Google's top ten, down from 76%. Rank is no longer a reliable predictor of citation.

How I would spend the next ninety days

If I were starting an AEO program today, I would not chase all twelve domains. I would pick the three that map to my category and go deep.

For B2B software that means G2, Reddit, and LinkedIn. For consumer products it means Amazon, Reddit, and YouTube. For local services it means Yelp, Google Business Profile, and Reddit. For anything health-adjacent it means the institutional tier, and honestly it means accepting that a commercial domain will struggle there.

Peec AI's own advice is the most useful line in any of the research I read, recommending teams focus on "finding out which domains matter most for your specific industry" rather than following a generic list. In hospitality, Booking.com and Airbnb routinely outrank Reddit. Your category almost certainly has an equivalent that appears on nobody's top ten.

The general answer to the headline question is Reddit. The useful answer is whichever domain your buyers' prompts actually surface, and you will only find that by measuring it.

 

 

Sources