What Are the Most Cited Domains in LLMs?

Discover the 50 most cited domains in LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini. See how citation share shapes AI visibility and brand authority in search.

by: Emily Axelsen
Published: September 9, 2025

A few websites, most notably Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and Reuters, account for a notable percentage of the citations that LLMs attach to their answers. Since these citations shape what people read when they consult AI tools, domains that dominate “citation share” reap disproportionate visibility, authority, and downstream traffic.

Borrowing a term from SEO, “citation share” is the new PageRank.

The domains most frequently cited by LLMs are reshaping the flow of online authority. Based on an analysis of 5.7 million citations collected between February and June 2025, here are the 20 most cited domains in AI answers across Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity:

These are the top 20 domains (we could only fit so many on the page), but you can download the full list of 50 here.

High Influence Sources

The highly influential brands are social media platforms or sites made up of user-generated content, business and commerce sites, corporate sites, and reference pages.

Analyzing the first category reveals that social is the dominant lever in shaping LLM citations and marketing influence by extension. For CMOs, this reinforces that social platforms set the baseline for how AI systems perceive brand authority. This means that investments in social listening, influencer partnerships, and community engagement can shape AI visibility.

Moderate & Low Influence Sources

Moderately influencable websites include news outlets, the content of which can be directly influenced through PR and press releases such as reuters.com, apnews.com, cnn.com, nytimes.com, yahoo.com, axios.com, washingtonpost.com, wsj.com, foxnews.com, theguardian.com, bbc.com, latimes.com, theatlantic.com, and aljazeera.com.

Low and no marketing influence describes sources that are academic or scientific, technical, or medical.

Combining the data for sites that are considered to be high and moderate influence sources reveals that 74% of the most-cited domains in LLMs are susceptible to marketing influence.

What Does It Mean to Be “Most Cited” by LLMs?

Domains that are the “most cited” appear most frequently in footnotes, carousel cards, sidebars, or inline links that answer engines attach to their summaries. Citation share is more granular than traffic or backlinks, and reveals which brands are trusted most consistently by AI systems as sources of truth. It is essential to position your brand as a source of truth in order to improve the frequency and sentiment with which LLMs talk about your brand.

Recent analyses also reveal that AI answer engines concentrate citations on a few brands. For example, Google’s AI Overviews cite news sources in about 20% of responses, and within those, the top 10 news outlets capture nearly 80% of all mentions, with outlets like BBC, The New York Times, and CNN dominating.

Comparing Mention Share & Impression Share

This highlights a distinction between mention share ( how often a domain is cited) and impression share (citation frequency adjusted by visibility context). A source might have few citations but still have a high impression share if it appears in places that garner attention in AI summaries.

For example, a brand can have thousands of LLM citations, giving it a high citation share, with only a select few being for key phrases or queries that have high visibility within the topic. This concept and contextualization make both mention share and impression share valuable AI visibility metrics to track.

Do Influential Domains Matter for AI Visibility?

Brands in the top quartile for web mentions receive over 10x more citations in AI Overviews than those in the subsequent quartile; and with more citations comes more highly qualified and converting traffic. To capture this high-converting traffic, brands should improve their presence on LLMs. One way to do this is by leveraging answer engine optimization platforms like Goodie AI, which can help you own your narrative on AI platforms.

Showing up in AI summaries is important because user adoption of these summaries is rapidly expanding. The majority ( 58%) of respondents in a March 2025 study visited a search result page with a summary generated by AI.

With increased visibility in AI, brands become more authoritative. More authoritative brands are cited more frequently, and more citations compound a domain’s authority and visibility. This creates a virtuous cycle for the dominant few, while the others are left behind. From a CMO’s perspective, the takeaway is that citation concentration signals where to direct budget.

Becoming the top search result is essential for your brand to stand out against the competitors as a result of Google’s “winner takes all” attitude with AI Overview.

Where Does Citation Data Come From?

Research and analytics vendors track LLMs and their citation patterns. There are three primary categories of these sources: direct scraping, crawling at scale, and benchmarking studies.

Direct Scraping

Google and OpenAI display citations in their UI for transparency. Researchers can capture them by scraping or parsing the UI to analyze the AI citation behavior.

Large-Scale Crawling

Specialized tools and vendor panels scan AI responses for outbound links and domains. Dedicated platforms such as Goodie continuously monitor AI answer engines by logging outbound links and domain mentions over time.

Benchmarking Studies

Industry research compares citation sets from AI models with traditional SEO APIs to analyze overlap and identify unique biases present in AI selection criteria.

How Can You Verify Citation Rankings Are Accurate?

Citation share, like any metric, can fluctuate over time and across different AI tools. To verify accuracy, researchers can sample queries at various times of day to account for fluctuations, as citations may vary by hour. Cross-referencing multiple tracking vendors can smooth out sampling noise.

How to Find the Most Cited Domains?

To find the most cited domains in AI search, consult comprehensive analyses created from AI model outputs and public citation domains. Our analysis of 5.7 million citations reveals that Wikipedia, Reddit, and Reuters top the list of the 50 most influential domains in responses generated by leading AI models.

Most Cited Domains in Fintech

Across the four major AI models, NerdWallet emerges as the singular leader across models and appears for top affiliates and listicles. This signals that both AI models and users recognize the site’s authority in comparative guidance for banking, payments, and personal finance. News outlets such as CNBC, Forbes, Bloomberg, and Business Insider hold strong as references, especially for breaking news, market trends, and analysis of financial products. Reference services like Investopedia and Bankrate surface when users seek education, definitions, or methodological clarity.

Most Cited Domains in B2B SaaS

Affiliate listicles, user-generated content, and authoritative industry players drive the B2B SaaS citation landscape. Curated software rankings on places like G2, Capterra, and PCMag have significant influence in the vendor discovery phase. Peer validation on places like Reddit, Wikipedia, and TrustRadius offers feedback from the real world and experimental insights that can push users toward action.

Most Cited Domains in Beauty & Personal Care

Domains that are dominated by influencers and social networks are the most influential in beauty and personal care. Consumer review sites, for example, hold outsized influence as users gravitate towards authentic content with peer testimonials and product discovery with social trends.

How to Improve Your Domain’s Influence in LLMs

For brands looking to maximize their impact during the AI search revolution, improving domain influence is priority number one. Here’s how to do it:

1. Target placements and expert citations in diverse and high-quality content that’s contextually relevant.
2. Use headers, BLUF content, and rich FAQ schema to make content easily digestible and rankable by LLMs.
3. Publish original reports regularly, as these types of assets are more likely to be referenced in AI responses.
4. Ensure accessibility to important landing pages for LLM crawlers by balancing open access with ethical and brand guidelines.
5. Use dedicated tracking tools to map your citation share weekly, close knowledge gaps, and correct misattributions.

Once the above tactics are applied, measuring success and course-adjusting becomes critical.