Featured Research · August 2026
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.”
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 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.
Under DA 40 — 34.5% of all citations
DA 40 and above — 65.5%
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.
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 | Relative | 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% |
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.
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.
