ObsurfableReports
Data and analysis on AI citation share, domain rankings, and benchmarks.
Platform house favorites in data infrastructure: Bright Data vs Snowflake
On data-infrastructure buyer prompts, Perplexity names Bright Data first on 33% of answers and mentions it on 73% — while ChatGPT leads with Snowflake on 9% and mentions Bright Data on 10%. Search-native engines share a scraping-vendor shortlist ChatGPT rarely opens with.
Rival engines crown ChatGPT on AEO buyer prompts — ChatGPT doesn't crown itself
On 46 matched SEO/AEO tool prompts, Grok names ChatGPT as the
Where AI engines actually cite: vendors, not review sites
Across 18,600 citations in Obsurfable's research corpus, review aggregators account for 0.3% of linked domains — vendor-owned sites capture 85.5%. When AI answers attach sources, they link to product pages, not G2.
Top Domains Cited by LLMs: October 2026
October's independent panels show Forbes displacing Reddit as the most-shared source on everyday questions, Perplexity's community share collapsing, and owned domains still at ~1.5% of buyer-answer citations — plus Brand Radar continuity tables expanded to Gemini and Copilot.
No category leader: AI recommendations are universally fragmented
Across 325 buyer categories in Obsurfable's research corpus, zero have a dominant
Marketing leaders prioritize AI search. Most still cannot measure it.
AirOps' 2026 Marketing Leaders Reality Index surveyed 300+ leaders — 86.6% prioritize AI search, yet measurement confidence is low and only 7.4% rate AI maturity as advanced. Here is what that gap means for AEO.
Platform house favorites in transactional email APIs
On 117 matched buyer prompts in API Platforms, Perplexity names Notify as the
The citation gap: same prompt, different answer anatomy
On 531 matched buyer prompts run through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, ChatGPT returns zero cited sources on 91% of answers — while Claude attaches four or more on 58%. The engines do not just disagree on brands; they ship different answer shapes.
When AI engines disagree on brand shortlists
On 531 matched buyer prompts run through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, 46% share zero brands in their top-five shortlists — and only 34% agree on the number 1 pick between ChatGPT and Gemini.
Top Domains Cited by LLMs: September 2026
Ahrefs Brand Radar's September snapshots show Reddit overtaking YouTube on Perplexity for the first time, google.com rising to 12.5% in AI Mode, and ChatGPT leaning harder on health and institutional sources as dictionary sites fall back.
Top Domains Cited by LLMs: August 2026
Ahrefs Brand Radar's latest monthly snapshots put Reddit at 16.7% of ChatGPT citations and YouTube at 31.2% of Perplexity's. Here is the August 2026 leaderboard by platform — and what moved since July.
Top Domains Cited by LLMs: July 2026
A data-backed look at which domains ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews cite most in 2026, why Reddit and Wikipedia dominate, and what the citation distribution means for AI visibility.
The Rise of AI Answers and Zero-Click Search
Search is shifting from clicks to citations. AI-driven “answer engines” are rapidly changing how people find information online. Recent research shows zero-click searches now exceed 50–60% of all searches.
AI's Most Cited Domains - Top 50
Citation share of the top 50 domains across industries based on 5.7 million citations. Data from September 2025.