Key findings
Each statement stands on its own and carries its number. A citation is every link a model shows as a source for its answer: if one answer lists seven sources, that counts as seven citations.
- Between 67.8% and 75.2% of AI citations point to pages two or more levels deep inside a site, not to the homepage.
- The company blog is the most cited page type, with 8,139 citations, but it reaches the first source slot only 7.5% of the time, at an average position of 10.2.
- Any combination of AI models agrees on only 3.5% of the exact URLs it cites. At the domain level the overlap rises to 10.4%.
- ChatGPT cites product pages (31.3%) more than blog posts (12.6%). The other four models cite the company blog most, at 33.1% to 42.5%.
- No brand domain cleared 10% of the citations in its own category. The average was 3.3%: the remaining 96.7% goes to third parties.
- The single most cited domain accounts for 3.6% of all citations, and it takes 500 domains to cover half of them.
- 47.45% of Google AI Overview citations were already in the organic results of the same search. In AI Mode, 85.29% of citations were in none of the organic results, the ads or the AI Overview.
- Paid ads accounted for 0.03% of AI Overview citations, and 0 of 75 paid pages persisted into AI Mode.
- YouTube weighs 1.72% in organic results and 7.72% in AI Overview citations. Reddit and Wikipedia together add up to 1.57% in the same sample.
- No page scoring under 40 out of 100 on AEO readiness received a single citation. Above 40 the score stops sorting: pages graded C were cited 17.5% of the time and pages graded B, 2.4%.
The numbers behind the charts
Citations by page type and position in the source list
| Page type | Citations | Reaches 1st slot | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | 1,165 | 14.2% | 5.9 |
| Guide or resource | 2,436 | 12.5% | 8.4 |
| Social and video | 1,835 | 11.4% | 7.5 |
| Product page | 4,841 | 8.6% | 8.5 |
| Company blog | 8,139 | 7.5% | 10.2 |
| 411 | 6.8% | 7.4 |
What each model cites
| Model | Citations | Blog | Product | Homepage | Social and video |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | 2,909 | 42.5% | 28.2% | 6.9% | 0.5% |
| Google AI Mode | 2,514 | 39.1% | 23.4% | 5.6% | 12.1% |
| ChatGPT | 2,151 | 12.6% | 31.3% | 10.6% | 0.7% |
| Gemini | 1,567 | 38.7% | 22.4% | 16.5% | 3.1% |
| Perplexity | 1,477 | 33.1% | 30.6% | 7.0% | 4.7% |
Classification by page type over the 10,618 citations of the multi model set. 97% of the citations were identified.
Google AI Overview against Google AI Mode
| Metric | AI Overview | AI Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Citations already present in the same search (organic results for AI Overview; organic, ads or AI Overview for AI Mode) | 47.45% | 14.71% |
| Average citations per answer | 7.53 | 14.98 |
| Paid ads | 0.03% of citations | 0 of 75 paid pages persisted |
From a parallel experiment of 518 Google searches between July and August 2026, across ten industries and two markets, captured with GEO Observer. It is reported separately and does not add to the 21,571 total.
AEO readiness score against real citation rate
| Page grade | Citation rate |
|---|---|
| A · 85 and up | 11.9% |
| B · 70 to 84 | 2.4% |
| C · 55 to 69 | 17.5% |
| D · 40 to 54 | 2.8% |
| F · under 40 | 0% |
1,486 URLs with a known AEO score, crossed against the citations they actually received. Cited pages average 844 words against 2,119 for uncited ones.
Methodology
Data cutoff: August 11, 2026. The 21,571 citations come from two datasets that are never mixed: 10,618 from monitoring queries across five models, and 10,953 from real Google captures. The two datasets share only 307 URLs.
Citations come from monitoring programs active on the Dashcrab platform and from field work with GEO Observer, the free Dashcrab Chrome extension. For every citation we recorded the URL, the model and the position in the source list.
No brands, own domains or individual categories are identified: every figure is reported aggregated or anonymized.
The study is observational and does not demonstrate causality in any direction. The full methodology, the tables by industry and the 26 references are in the PDF, which is published in Spanish.
How to cite this study
Bedrossian, R. (2026). GEO Citation Research 2026: what AI models actually cite. Dashcrab. https://dashcrab.app/en/research/ai-citation-study-2026.html
You can quote any finding above with a link to this page. The URL is permanent.
Read the full analysis
- What pages does AI actually cite when it answers?
- What does each AI model cite: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini?
- Does your SEO get you into Google's AI Overview?
- Can you trust a GEO study?
- Full study as PDF (20 pages, in Spanish)
See what AI cites for your own brand: AI visibility tracker, the free GEO Observer Chrome extension, or a free AI visibility report.