# Featured AI Citation Report, June-August 2026 - Published: 2026-08-24 - Author: [Featured](https://press.featured.com/author/featured.md) - Topics: [Research](https://press.featured.com/research.md) - Source: https://press.featured.com/research/ai-citation-report-august-2026/ - Publisher: Featured Press Room We analysed **405 GEO audits** run on Featured between June and August 2026 — **22,881 real citations** that AI search engines returned across **11,499 different domains**, matched against Moz Domain Authority. Here is what those sources actually look like. **34.5%** of the citations AI search returned pointed to a domain with Domain Authority under 40. > More than a third of the citations AI search returned when answering buying questions pointed to domains with a Domain Authority under 40 — domains most brands have never thought to pitch. ## Key Definitions - **Domain** — A website, identified by its address (for example, forbes.com or reddit.com). We count domains when we talk about how many websites appear in the study. - **Domain Authority (DA)** — Moz’s 0–100 score for how much web authority a domain has. A third-party SEO metric, not something AI engines use themselves. - **Source** — A domain that an AI engine draws information from when answering a question. The source is where the information comes from, not the answer itself. - **Citation** — Each instance of a source appearing in an AI answer. A citation points to where information came from, not what the answer is. If forbes.com appears in 40 answers, that is 1 domain, 1 source, and 40 citations. ## Six findings ### 34.5% — A third of citations come from low-authority domains 34.5% of all 22,881 citations pointed to a domain scoring under DA 40, and 13.2% pointed to domains under DA 20. ### 53.9% — Most cited domains are small Counting each domain once, 53.9% of the 11,499 domains AI search drew from score under DA 40, and the median domain scores just 37. But counting each citation instead, the median rises to DA 56 because a small number of large domains are cited repeatedly. Most websites are small, but the websites that get cited repeatedly tend to be larger. ### 76% — There is no shortlist to get on 76% of the domains cited appeared exactly once across the entire study. The 100 most-cited domains account for under a quarter of all citations, and even the top 1,000 account for less than half. A fixed list of twenty big-name domains does not describe where AI search draws its answers from. ### 78.5% — Most brands do not appear in AI answers Of the 378 brands audited across 344 industries, 78.5% did not appear in the AI-generated answer to a single buying question in their category. Only 6.7% of the 1,983 questions tested included the brand in the answer at all. ### 92.6% — Your own domain is rarely a source 92.6% of the brands audited never had their own domain appear as a citation in an AI answer about their category. Content from the brands’ own websites accounted for just 1.7% of classified citations — competitor domains were cited 13× more often. ### 9.2% — YouTube and Reddit are the two biggest single sources YouTube and Reddit together account for 9.2% of all citations in the study (YouTube 5.5%, Reddit 3.7%). The ten most-cited user-generated platforms collectively account for 11.7% of all citations, with YouTube and Reddit alone making up 9.2%. ## The authority of a cited source The distribution is **bimodal**. There is a hard spike at the very top — 31.2% of citations go to DA 80+ giants — and a long, dense floor below DA 40 worth another **34.5%**. The middle is thin, which is exactly where most brands’ owned content and mid-tier press coverage sits. ![Share of all 22,881 citations by the Domain Authority of the cited domain, as bars scaled to the largest band. Under DA 40, 34.5% of all citations: DA 0–9: 4.9% · DA 10–19: 8.3% · DA 20–29: 9.6% · DA 30–39: 11.7%. DA 40 and above, 65.5%: DA 40–49: 9.1% · DA 50–59: 11.0% · DA 60–69: 7.7% · DA 70–79: 6.6% · DA 80–100: 31.2%](https://featured-com-images.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/featured-sites/press.featured.com/uploads/2026/10/chart-aicite-authority-a0ae90a7.webp) - **34.5%** of citations pointed to a domain under DA 40 - **13.2%** went to a domain under DA 20 - **53.9%** of the 11,499 distinct domains cited are under DA 40 - **37** median DA of a distinct cited domain ## There is no shortlist AI citation is **extraordinarily long-tailed**. 22,881 citations were spread across 11,499 different domains, and **76% of those domains were cited exactly once**. Coverage climbs slowly, not sharply — there is no small set of domains that unlocks visibility. ![Line chart of the cumulative share of citations (y axis, 0% to 100%) as domains are added in rank order, most-cited domain first (x axis, from the most-cited domain to all 11,499 domains). The curve rises steeply, then slowly: Top 100 domains → 24.8% of citations; Top 1,000 domains (8.7%) → 45.1% of citations; all 11,499 domains → 100%. Even the top 1,000 domains out of 11,499 account for less than half of all citations](https://featured-com-images.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/featured-sites/press.featured.com/uploads/2026/10/chart-aicite-concentration-dd731fdc.webp) ## Where the citations came from Editorial coverage dominates, and brand-owned content is almost invisible at **1.7%**. A brand’s own domain is the least likely thing to be cited about that brand — competitors are cited **13×** more often. | Source type | Share | Median DA | Under DA 40 | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Editorial | 64.5% | 67 | 21.0% | | Competitor | 22.6% | 71 | 18.6% | | Reference | 8.6% | 91 | 1.0% | | Community | 2.6% | 92 | 0.4% | | Brand-owned | 1.7% | 44 | 45.8% | Based on the 10,176 citations our analysis classified by source type. This subset skews higher-authority than the full corpus, because the classification step selects notable sources. ## Method notes - **Method.** 405 GEO audits completed on Featured between 2 June and 21 August 2026, covering 378 brands across 344 industries. Each audit tested roughly five real buying questions — 1,983 in total — and recorded the sources returned, producing 22,881 citations across 11,499 distinct domains. All audits were run by real users; no synthetic runs are included. - **Domain Authority.** Moz Links API, queried at domain scope on 21 August 2026. The 1,000 most-cited domains were measured individually, covering 45.1% of all citations. The remaining 10,499 domains were estimated from a uniform random sample of 1,500. The estimate reproduces the known citation total to within 0.7%. - **Scope.** Citation data reflects AI search engines that perform live web retrieval and return their sources; figures here are drawn from Perplexity. Models answering without web retrieval do not expose sources and are excluded from all citation figures. Domain Authority is a third-party Moz metric and is not used by AI engines themselves — it is applied here only to characterise the domains being cited. ## See what AI search says about you Run a GEO audit on Featured and find the sources that answer buying questions in your category — including the ones most brands never think to pitch.

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