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Why other people's websites decide your AI visibility

We measured our own category and found 93.6% of citations pointed somewhere other than the brand's own site.

Last updated 2026-07-30

We ran our own product against our own category — 10 questions, 4 assistants, 40 answers — and published everything, including the part where we scored zero. The finding that mattered was not our score. It was where the citations went.

Across those answers, 93.6% of cited sources were third-party: review sites, listicles, Reddit threads, comparison articles, news. Brands' own websites were a small minority of what the assistants actually quoted.

What follows from that

You can do everything right on your own website and still be invisible. Schema, llms.txt and crawler access are necessary hygiene — they make you quotable when someone does reach you — but they are not the lever.

The lever is being present on the sites the assistants already trust for your category. Your Sources page lists exactly which ones those are, and Gap analysis narrows it to the sites that cite your competitors and have never cited you.

What to actually do

• Open Sources, then Gap analysis. That is your outreach list, ranked.
• Start with editorial and review sites — those are reachable. A Reddit thread is not something you should try to manufacture.
• Get listed, get reviewed, get included in comparisons. Slow, unglamorous, and the thing that works.

Related

• Visibility, Authority and Position — what each one means
• Why your sentiment score is probably 50
• Why your score moved (or didn't)
• Why the assistants disagree with each other