The AI Citation Study: what AI actually cites when it names a business
Why this exists. Every roundup of AI visibility tools ranks the tools. None of them measured what the engines actually cite. We ran the checks and logged every source URL, so here is the data instead of an opinion. Use it, quote it, argue with it. Every number carries its sample size.
Finding 1, local business queries
From 99 citations across 5 real dated business checks, asking the question a customer would ask, such as who is the best roofer in a given city.
| Source type | Share of citations |
|---|---|
| The business's own website | 49.5 percent |
| Directory and profile listings | 20.2 percent |
| Community and social | 15.2 percent |
| Roundup listicles | 2.0 percent |
Inside the directory bucket, the specific sources cited for the businesses that won: BBB cited 4 times, Yelp 3, city government and utility pages 6, plus Nextdoor and Mapquest. Inside community, Facebook pages carried 3 citations for winners. Every one of those is free to claim.
Finding 2, category and tool queries
From 93 citations on the other kind of question entirely, the best X tool kind, which is how buyers find software.
| Source type | Share of citations |
|---|---|
| Vendor websites | 40.9 percent |
| Community | 24.7 percent |
| Roundup listicles | 17.2 percent |
| News | 7.5 percent |
The finding that matters most
The two segments do not behave the same way, and it is not close. Roundup listicles carry roughly eight times more weight on a software or vendor search than on a local business search: 17.2 percent versus 2.0 percent. Community more than doubles too, 24.7 versus 15.2.
That is why generic AEO advice fails. A checklist that tells a plumber to chase listicle placements is spending their time on the source type that carried 2 percent of the citations that named their competitors. A checklist that tells a SaaS founder their own site is nearly everything is understating how much the community and the lists decide it.
Practical version. Local business: answer-shaped pages on your own domain, then claim the free directory ring. That is roughly 70 percent of what named the winners. Software or vendor: your own site still leads, but the lists and the forums are where you are actually chosen, and being absent from them is invisible in a way no amount of on-site work fixes.
Method
Buyer-shaped questions were asked on live AI engines and every cited source URL in each answer was recorded and classified by source type. Totals are counts of citations, not counts of answers, so an answer citing four directories contributes four rows. Checks are dated individually. The businesses in the local sample are real and their results include the ones that were named by nobody.
Weaknesses, printed at the same size as the findings
This is first-party data, not a third-party study. The local sample is 5 business checks producing 99 citations, which is small. Some captures are single-engine rather than all five. The category sample of 93 citations comes from our own checks on our own category, so we are inside the sample we are measuring. AI answers also personalize and drift over time, so any of these numbers can move. We publish the method so you can run it yourself and disagree with us using data instead of vibes.
Who ran this, and what we sell
Namebeam checks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overview name a business when a customer asks for a recommendation, and returns the dated raw transcript rather than a score.
We are our own first customer, and we are losing. Namebeam scored zero out of five on its own first check and we published that, dated. We have zero paying customers as of 2026-08-04. Our running record, wins and losses printed the same size, is public at proof.namebeam.ai. We think you should audit a vendor before you pay one, so we made ourselves auditable first.
Citing this study
Free to quote with attribution. Suggested line: Namebeam AI Citation Study, 2026, namebeam.ai/ai-citation-study.html. If you are maintaining a roundup of AI visibility tools and want the underlying method, write to [email protected] and we will send it.
Run the free check on your own business