“The AI Cites Whatever It Wants. What Am I Supposed To Do?”
A while back I wrote about where AI pulls its answers from, and the short version was grim: Wikipedia and Reddit, mostly. If you do PR or marketing, that probably landed like a small punch. Your brand’s story, decided on some anonymous message board you’ll never touch.
I’ve watched people around me go quiet about it. “If the AI just parrots whatever’s on a forum, there’s nothing to do.” You can’t edit Reddit into liking you, so why try?
But a bigger, newer study pulls the other way — hard. It says more than eight in ten of the sources AI actually cites are places you can walk in and edit yourself.
So today I want to sit with that gap. How much of what the AI says about you is really out of your hands?
Someone Counted 6.8 Million Citations. 86% Were Your Own Turf.
The study comes from Yext, a company that sells digital-presence management for brands (which, yes, means they sell more or less the thing this study makes you want to buy — keep that in the back of your head). They put it out in 2025.
Here’s the method. They took three models — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — threw 1.6 million queries at each, and looked at where the resulting 6.8 million citations came from.
And the breakdown is kind of a relief:
- Your own site: 2.9 million citations, 44% of the total
- Listings: 2.9 million, 42%
- Reviews and social: 545,000, 8%
Your own site plus listings is 86% right there. Meanwhile — with location and search intent held steady — third-party forums like Reddit came in at a measly 2%.
“Listings” here means the basic business info sitting in your Google Business Profile and the various directories: address, hours, category, what you sell. Stuff you can fill in and fix. Add your own site, and both of the big buckets are places you can reach.
Every Model Has A Favorite Place To Look
“So I just polish my website and I’m done”? Not quite. The same study found each model has its own taste in sources.
- Gemini leans on your own site (52.1%)
- ChatGPT (OpenAI) tilts toward listings (48.7%)
- Perplexity scatters — MapQuest, TripAdvisor, all over the map
Industry moves it too. Retail pulls 47.6% from the brand’s own site and finance 48.2%, both site-heavy. But healthcare leans on directory listings (52.6%), and restaurants are the odd one out, with reviews and social carrying 13.3% — the only corner where word of mouth gets real weight.
So the place worth polishing depends on your industry and on which model your customers actually use. Not “buff the homepage and call it a day” — first you need to know which AI is looking where, for a business like yours.
”But Didn’t You Say It Was All Reddit?”
Now, if you were paying attention, something just snagged. Last time the headline was “Reddit tops the AI citation charts.” This time Reddit is 2%. Those can’t both be true, right?
They can, actually — nobody’s lying. The numbers split because the questions were different. The roundup I covered before (the top-sources tally) swept up broad, general-knowledge queries across every topic.
Yext’s study held location and search intent steady and looked at a store-and-brand world: retail, finance, healthcare, restaurants. Different questions, so different answers.
Measure “where AI gets its citations” two ways, and the conclusion flips. It’s a bit like a blood test that reads differently depending on the time of day and whether you ate first. Same body, different number.
Which points at a pretty simple lesson. Don’t swallow someone’s generalized “A is B” ranking — it isn’t your answer. Ask about general knowledge and Wikipedia and Reddit show up; ask about your name and your category, and your own site and listings do the heavy lifting. Which one matters to you? You don’t know until you measure it with your name, in your industry.
Conclusion: Start With The 86% You Can Actually Move
Pull it together and the story is this: AI-era brand exposure isn’t decided only in the places strangers talk about you. At least for store-and-brand questions, 86% of the citations come from your own yard — your site and your listings. Before you let the places you can’t reach jerk you around, get the reachable 86% in order. That’s the order of operations.
I’ll admit I started out in the “it’s all message boards, so give up” camp too. Looking at this, I had it backwards. And the to-do list narrows to two things.
First, get your own site and listings accurate and current. Company name, category, what you sell, the details you want to be found for — check that none of it’s rotting from three years ago. The AI picks up what’s written there pretty faithfully, so when it’s off, the AI’s answer is off by the same amount.
Second, once that’s clean, watch your AI exposure through the lens of your own industry and the models your customers actually use. Gemini reads your site, ChatGPT reads your listings — since they don’t look in the same place, the only way to know what’s worth fixing is to keep an eye on your own situation over time.
None of this means the third-party stuff stops mattering. For general-knowledge questions, that’s still where the weight sits, exactly like last time (here’s that piece). Tend your own yard first, grow the public reputation second. In that order, the “nothing I can do” problem turns out to have a lot more give in it than it looked.
Sources
- [R] Yext (2025), “Yext Research: 86% of AI Citations Come from Brand-Managed Sources”, yext.com
- [R] Contently (2026), “Top Sources LLMs Cite Most in 2026”, contently.com
