What did Muck Rack find about AI citations?
Muck Rack's October 2026 What Is AI Reading? report, published October 28, ran the same prompts twice on the same day and compared the sources each AI cited. ChatGPT kept only 41% of the same domains on the second run. Gemini kept 45%. Perplexity kept 94%.
The report draws on more than 40 million AI responses and 207 million citations collected from January through September 2026, plus a September test of 1,020 unbranded consumer prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, according to Muck Rack and Superpower Daily, which covered the release the same morning. Muck Rack did not publish a repeat figure for Claude.
| AI assistant | Cited domains repeated on a second run, same day |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 41% |
| Gemini | 45% |
| Perplexity | 94% |
| Claude | Not reported |
If a customer asks ChatGPT the same question at 9am and again at 3pm, more than half of the websites it leans on can change.
Where do AI answers get their sources?
More than 84% of AI citations come from earned and third-party sources, meaning pages other people wrote. Nearly 99% come from non-paid sources. Paid and advertorial content made up 0.3% of citations in September, the same as in May.
The mix is moving. Journalism fell to 22% of citations in September, down from 27% in May, the biggest shift across Muck Rack's four editions of the study. Most of that share went to other buckets:
- Third-party corporate content rose from 24.0% to 25.1%
- Aggregators and encyclopedic sites rose from 17.4% to 18.3%
- Owned media (a company's own website and content) rose from 13.7% to 15.2%
- Government and NGO sites rose from 8.6% to 9.6%
Only 212 domains were cited by all four major AI providers in the September test.
One caveat. Muck Rack sells Generative Pulse, a product that tracks AI citations (the press release carries its name), so it has a reason to tell people that checking once isn't enough. The public summary also doesn't share confidence intervals. The numbers still line up with what I see when I run the same question through ChatGPT a few times: the answers move.
What does this mean if you run ads or answer leads?
It means a single check of "does ChatGPT recommend my business" tells you almost nothing. The sources behind that answer change from run to run, and you can't pay your way into the citations, since paid content is 0.3% of them.
I've been running ads since 2013, and AI answers are the first big source of customers I've seen where ad money buys almost nothing. In this data, 84% of what AI cites is pages someone else wrote about a topic. For a local business, I read that as review sites, local directories, local news and industry roundups. That last part is my read, not a Muck Rack finding, but it's where the 84% has to come from for a roofer or a dental office.
Reviews are the piece you control most directly. A steady flow of fresh reviews gives every one of those third-party pages something current to say about you. Our guide to getting more Google reviews on autopilot walks through the texts and timing.
KenjiAI sends review requests by text and email after every job, suggests replies to the reviews that come in with AI, and answers the calls and texts those reviews bring in with Voice AI and Conversation AI agents that book straight onto your calendar. If people are finding you through AI answers, that last step decides whether they turn into customers. You can see how it works on our voice agents page.
What should you do this week?
Test your visibility the way the report did: same prompt, several runs. Then work on the pages AI pulls from, and make sure you answer fast when someone does reach out.
- Write down three questions a customer would ask an AI about your service, with your city in them. For example, "best emergency plumber in Tampa".
- Run each one in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity three times over a week. Log whether you're named and which sites each answer cites.
- Look at the cited sites that keep coming back. Claim and fill out your profile on each one that lists businesses.
- Send a review request to every customer from the last 90 days who hasn't left one.
- Add a plain question-and-answer section to your own site. Owned media is 15.2% of citations and growing.
When a lead does come through from an AI answer, it goes cold just as fast as one from an ad. Our piece on speed to lead covers how quickly you need to respond and what to automate first.