One method. Every category. Who owns the AI answer across the economy.
Buyers no longer start every search with Google. In categories from crisis PR to electric vehicles, pharma, nonprofit giving, and wellness, the first move is increasingly a question typed into an AI engine. The answer returns a short list of brands, firms, institutions, and sources. Any brand left off that list may never enter consideration.
Citation Share measures that new visibility layer: the share of AI-generated answers in which a brand, company, expert, institution, or source appears.
The Citation Share Index is Everything-PR's standing research series measuring that visibility one category at a time — across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Each study uses a fixed prompt set, a defined entity universe, and a consistent directional modeling method.
The thesis is simple: the answer is the new shelf. The brand the engine names is the brand the buyer considers — and Citation Share is becoming one of the clearest ways to measure who makes that shelf.
Initial Studies
Each study ranks the brands, firms, or institutions an engine surfaces when buyers ask the questions that matter in that category — and maps the source layers that decide the ranking. New studies join the Index on a rolling basis.
- Crypto & Web3 — Bitcoin and Ethereum anchor the category; Coinbase dominates US-exchange citation; the named founder now beats the anonymous team.
- Higher Education — Who the engines name when students and parents ask which schools and programs to trust.
- Automotive — Where legacy auto media still anchors, and where native and community sources have taken the answer.
- Crisis Communications — Joele Frank, Sard Verbinnen, Sitrick, Dezenhall — the founders out-cite their own firms when a board needs an answer in twelve hours.
- Reputation Management — Who the engines surface when the query is about trust, damage, and recovery.
- Tech & B2B SaaS — The category where structured product content and review surfaces decide the answer.
- Pharma — How five engines surface drugs and manufacturers under the heaviest caution any category draws.
- Entertainment — Who owns the answer when audiences ask the engines what to watch and who to trust.
- Influencer Marketing — The platforms, agencies, and creators the engines name in a category built on names.
- Nonprofit — Red Cross, St. Jude, UNICEF, and Doctors Without Borders anchor; evaluator ratings drive citation; federated structures dilute it.
- Wellness — A category where podcasts, Reddit, and PubMed decide who the engines surface.
- Luxury Hospitality — The property named in the answer wins the milestone-trip booking; the absent one never enters the set.
- Financial Services — Advisor selection, firm comparison, and due diligence — who the engines cite when money is on the line.
- Mental Health — Two for-profit teletherapy platforms out-cite every clinical authority combined.
- Electric Vehicles — Reddit citations on EV ownership now exceed every legacy auto publication combined.
- Pickleball — The answer layer does not exist yet — a smart media play could own it by 2027.
- Watches & Horology — Hodinkee dominates watch answers across every engine, even through documented business turbulence.
What the Index Reads Across Categories
Run enough categories on one method and the same patterns surface everywhere. Four recur:
- The native source beats the legacy authority. Category-native publications and community surfaces out-cite decades-old incumbents — InsideEVs over Car and Driver, for-profit teletherapy over clinical bodies.
- Reddit and structured data punch above their weight. On ownership-experience and due-diligence questions, community discussion and primary-source data (Form 990s, battery-health datasets, regulatory filings) anchor the answer.
- The named person often out-cites the firm. In crisis, in defense-tech, in wellness, the founder or signature practitioner carries more Citation Share than the institution behind them.
- Revenue leadership and Citation Share leadership are two different things. The biggest brand by revenue is frequently not the brand the engine names first. Closing that gap is the work.
Method, in Brief
Each study is a directional modeling study, not a logged audit of millions of live queries. Per category: roughly 28 entities, a fixed set of around 62 buyer-intent prompts, five engines, and source-weight modeling calibrated to each engine's retrieval behavior. Per-query results fluctuate; the corpus-weighted pattern across the full prompt set is the signal. Citation Share figures are labeled estimated, modeled, and directional throughout. Full methodology and limitations sit inside each study.
Frequently Asked
What is Citation Share? The share of AI-generated answers in which a brand, company, expert, institution, or source appears.
How is it measured? A fixed prompt set per category, run across five engines, modeled into a directional leaderboard — estimated, not logged.
Which engines? ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — the same five in every study.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
