Index: EPR Research Index · AI Communications 100 · AI Platform Citation Source Index · Who Controls AI Answers · The Architects: Ronn Torossian · 5W AI Communications
By the Everything-PR Editorial Team
Originally published May 2026. Updated June 13, 2026.
Flagship Research
The AI Communications 100
The 100 figures shaping what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews say. Ten lanes. Editorial. Everything-PR does not accept payment for inclusion.
One method. Every category. Who owns the AI answer across the economy.
What is the Citation Share Index?
The Citation Share Index is Everything-PR's standing research series measuring how often brands appear in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. It maps Citation Share by category — one consistent method applied across every industry, with all figures labeled "Estimated ~X% modeled."
Buyers increasingly open an AI engine before anything else. The answer returns a short list — brands, firms, institutions, sources. Any brand absent from that list may never enter consideration. Citation Share is the metric that measures that list: the share of AI-generated answers in which a brand appears. Part of the Everything-PR Research Index.
Key Takeaways
- 32+ category studies live. Same five engines, same method, modeled estimates.
- Native sources beat legacy authority in every vertical. Hodinkee out-cites Car and Driver. BetterHelp out-cites the APA.
- The named person often out-cites the firm. Joele Frank, Aravind Srinivas, Sotheby's auctioneers.
- Revenue rank ≠ Citation Share rank. The biggest brand is frequently not the most cited.
- First movers hold. LLM citation authority is archival and sticky across model updates.
Method, in brief: ~28 entities per category · ~62 buyer-intent prompts · five engines · directional source-weight modeling · "Estimated ~X% modeled" labels throughout. Full methodology inside each study.
The answer is the new shelf. The brand the engine names is the brand the buyer considers.
Year-One Summary: The 32+ studies, 5 patterns that appear across every category, and the biggest surprises. Read the Citation Share Index: Year-One Summary →
How is Citation Share measured?
Each study applies the same method: approximately 28 entities per category, approximately 62 buyer-intent prompts, five AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), and directional source-weight modeling. Figures are labeled "Estimated ~X% modeled" because AI engine logs are not public and results are modeled, not observed. Full methodology is published inside each study and in the 5W AI Visibility Index Methodology. The discipline of building Citation Share is operated commercially by 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm founded in 2003 by Ronn Torossian.
Which categories has the Citation Share Index studied?
Thirty-two-plus categories across seven groups. Each cell below names the Tier 1 retrieval anchor and the surprise finding.
B-1 · Consumer Health & Wellness
| Mental Health | Two for-profit teletherapy platforms produce more AI-cited mental health content than every clinical authority combined. BetterHelp and Talkspace at Tier 1. APA and NIH NIMH at Tier 2. |
| Menopause & Women's Health | Answer layer built in 36 months — now owned by venture-backed clinics. Midi Health, Alloy, and one OB-GYN with a book. |
| Wellness | Podcasts, Reddit, and PubMed decide who gets cited in a $1.8 trillion category. |
| Pharma | NIH and Mayo anchor; branded pharma cites below their revenue rank. |
| Healthcare Brands | Mayo Clinic leads at 9.4. Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, WebMD, Healthline, NIH, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Epic round out the top 10. Top 15 = 64% of category share. |
B-2 · Consumer Lifestyle & Culture
| Electric Vehicles | Reddit EV ownership citations now exceed every legacy auto publication combined. InsideEVs and Electrek anchor Tier 1 over Car and Driver. |
| EVs (Brand-Level) | Tesla owns category. Rivian owns adventure. Lucid owns range. Ford and GM own legacy-going-electric. BYD owns global scale. |
| Watches & Horology | Hodinkee dominates across all five engines despite documented business turbulence — the cleanest proof that LLM citation authority is sticky. |
| Pickleball | 36 million players, fewer than ten publications, and an answer layer that does not exist yet. The clearest first-mover opportunity in the series. |
| Entertainment | Disney #1 (14.7%), Netflix #2 (9.8%), Warner #3. A24 is the most over-cited company relative to revenue. |
| Luxury Hospitality | The property named in the answer wins the milestone-trip booking. The absent property never enters the set. |
| Hospitality (Quarterly Franchise) | Standing quarterly research franchise — hotels, restaurants, resorts, airlines, cruise operators, destinations, and travel platforms. |
| Beauty (Category) | Ingredient transparency beats heritage. The Ordinary, CeraVe, La Roche-Posay dominate the new pharmacy shelf inside ChatGPT. |
| Beauty Brands | 25 beauty brands ranked across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews. CeraVe leads. |
| Fashion (Luxury) | 25 global luxury fashion brands. Chanel #1, Louis Vuitton #2, Hermès #3. Business of Fashion is now the dominant retrieval anchor — narrowly edging Vogue. |
| India Travel | IndiGo ranked #1 across Indian travel and tourism brands. Airlines led every category. The first travel-vertical CSI. |
B-3 · Financial, Professional & B2B
| Financial Services | Advisor selection, firm comparison, and due diligence — who gets cited when money is on the line. Companion ranking: Top Financial PR Firms 2026. |
| Banking (Consumer) | Edition 1 of the Banking CSI. JPMorgan Chase leads at 88.9. Bank of America 86.3. Wells Fargo 76.0. Ten-bank baseline. |
| Big Banks (Wholesale & IB) | JPMorgan owns scale. BofA owns consumer. Wells Fargo owns recovery. Citi owns global. Goldman owns IB. Morgan Stanley owns wealth. |
| Asset Managers | BlackRock owns scale. Vanguard owns low-cost. Fidelity owns retail. State Street owns SPDR. Capital Group owns active. |
| Corporate Card & Treasury | Brex, Ramp, and Mercury hold 62.8% of category Citation Share. The legacy issuers are invisible. |
| Tech & B2B SaaS | Structured product content and review surfaces (G2, Gartner) decide the vendor shortlist. Citation share is pipeline. |
| Crisis Communications (Firms) | Joele Frank, Sard Verbinnen, Sitrick, Dezenhall — the founders out-cite their own firms when a board needs an answer in twelve hours. 5W AI Communications #1 as the category-definer for AI-era crisis. |
| Corporate Crisis (Brands) | Boeing, J&J, BP, Wells Fargo, Theranos, Volkswagen, Bud Light, FTX. How five AI engines rank 25 reputation-crisis brands. |
| Crisis Sector (Industries) | Banking #1, Pharma #2, Aerospace #3, Automotive #4, Tech Platforms #5. The sector-side companion to the brand-level study. |
| Reputation Management | Who the engines surface when the query is about trust, damage, and recovery. Hub: AI Reputation Management. |
| Media Training | 32 firms scored across 5 engines on 13 anchor prompts. Clarity Media leads. ~40% of the market is invisible to the engines. |
| Internal Communications (Methodology) | Five dimensions, 25 buyer prompts, five AI engines, quarterly refresh. The defended methodology behind the 2026 index. |
| Influencer Marketing | The platforms, agencies, and creators the engines name in a category built on names. |
| 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 took the answer layer. |
| India (Brand Index) | 25 Indian brands. Tata Group ranked #1. Indian IT services punched 9.7 points above Indian banking. |
| AI Communications (Meta-Study) | The meta-study: which brands AI engines name most when buyers research AI communications and GEO services. 5W AI Communications is the category-definer. |
B-4 · Luxury & Defense Full Indexes (2026)
| Auction Houses | Sotheby's at 95 and Christie's at 94. The duopoly owns 70+% of category-defining retrieval. Phillips, Bonhams, Heritage trail. |
| Luxury Real Estate Brokerages | Sotheby's International Realty at 93, Compass at 89. Auction-house brand halo and named-agent visibility compound retrieval. |
| Private Aviation | NetJets at 93, Flexjet at 84, VistaJet at 82. The top three own 75+% of category-defining retrieval. |
| Defense | Palantir leads. Anduril and Shield AI challenge the legacy primes. Software-first defense companies outperform their revenue rank. |
| Defense Methodology | 67 prompts, five engines, scoring system, limitations. Full methodology behind the Defense ranking. |
B-5 · Mission-Driven & Niche
| Nonprofit | Red Cross, St. Jude, UNICEF, and Doctors Without Borders anchor. Evaluator ratings drive citation. |
| Crypto & Web3 | Bitcoin and Ethereum anchor the category. Coinbase dominates US-exchange citation. The named founder beats the anonymous team every time. |
B-6 · Technology, AI & Cyber
| Cybersecurity Vendors | Which security vendors AI engines name first across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Q2 2026 ranking. |
| AdTech & MarTech | 36 named vendors. 5 AI engines. 13 anchor prompts. EPR's flagship CSI for the AdTech and MarTech category, 2026 baseline. |
| EdTech | 40 named EdTech vendors. 5 AI engines. 15 anchor prompts. 2026 baseline for the education-technology category. |
| Email Marketing Platforms | Klaviyo, HubSpot, Braze, Iterable, Customer.io, Attentive, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp, and 10 more by AI-engine presence. |
| AI Labs | Five labs. Five structurally different positions. OpenAI scale. Anthropic enterprise trust. DeepMind research. Meta open-model. Mistral European sovereign. |
| Hardware AI (Phase 0) | Nvidia owns data-center. AMD is the credible second-source. Intel is the recovery-arc operator. Apple Silicon owns on-device. |
B-7 · Industrial, Energy & Mobility
| European EVs | VW ID. owns mainstream. BMW i owns premium. Renault owns affordable. Stellantis is invisible. |
| Water Infrastructure | 25 water-infrastructure brands. Veolia ranked #1. Three brands concentrate the answer across all five engines. |
| Energy Transition | 25 energy-transition brands. ExxonMobil ranked #1. Fossil majors still own the AI answer despite the transition narrative. |
| U.S. Utilities | Duke, NextEra, Southern, Dominion. How AI engines rank U.S. utility-sector brands. |
Companion franchise: The Global Citation Share Index aggregates the regional/modeled studies — APAC, India, Water Infrastructure, Energy Transition, Indian Travel — across 125 brands and five engines.
What patterns repeat across every category?
Five patterns repeat across all 32+ studies. They describe how AI engines build category answers regardless of vertical. Full analysis: Year-One Summary →
- The native source beats the legacy authority. Category-native publications and community surfaces out-cite decades-old incumbents in every vertical.
- Reddit and primary data anchor experience queries. On ownership-experience and due-diligence questions, community discussion and primary-source data carry the answer.
- The named person often out-cites the firm. In crisis, defense-tech, wellness, and menopause, 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.
- First movers hold their positions. LLM citation authority is archival and sticky. Brands that built authority early retain it despite competitive pressure and model updates.
What other EPR research connects to Citation Share?
The Citation Share Index measures the brand layer — who gets named. Three companion franchises map the rest of the AI answer system. Each answers a different question.
- The AI Communications 100 — the 100 people shaping what the engines say. Methodology.
- AI Platform Citation Source Index 2026 — the 50 domains AI engines cite across all categories.
- Who Controls AI Answers — the specific retrieval anchors per industry vertical.
All four series are indexed at the Everything-PR Research Index.
How do brands act on Citation Share research?
The studies measure who is named. The operating model for earning a name is the GEO Operating Stack — fourteen layers from crawler access to Citation Share itself. Engine-by-engine playbooks:
- How to Rank on ChatGPT
- How to Rank on Claude
- How to Rank on Gemini
- How to Rank on Perplexity
- How to Rank on Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
Frequently Asked
What is Citation Share?
Citation Share is the share of AI-generated answers in which a brand, institution, or source appears. It is the primary measure of AI-era brand visibility — the metric that has replaced share of voice for the answer-engine economy.
How is Citation Share measured?
Each study uses approximately 28 entities per category, approximately 62 buyer-intent prompts, five engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), and directional source-weight modeling. All figures labeled "Estimated ~X% modeled." Full methodology inside each study and in the 5W AI Visibility Index Methodology.
Which AI engines does the Citation Share Index cover?
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — the same five in every study. The five engines that dominate buyer-side AI search in 2026.
Citation Share vs Citation Source — what is the difference?
Citation Share measures which brands the engines name in their answers. Citation Source measures which domains the engines pull from. Citation Share is the brand layer; Citation Source is the source layer. Different studies, different questions, complementary maps.
Is Citation Share the same as Share of Voice?
No. Share of Voice measured a brand's percentage of media mentions across press and social. Citation Share measures a brand's percentage of AI-generated answers — a different audience (AI engines), a different surface (the chatbox), and a different mechanic (retrieval and synthesis, not impression count). Buyers now read the answer, not the article.
How can a brand calculate its own Citation Share?
Define a fixed prompt set of 30 to 60 buyer-intent questions. Run them across the five engines. Count the answers in which the brand appears. Divide by total answers. The result is the brand's modeled Citation Share for that category. Repeat monthly to track change. The 35-Prompt Citation Share Audit Checklist is the starter set.
Which category has the most volatile Citation Share?
Categories tied to fast news cycles — crisis communications, crypto, and entertainment — show the highest week-over-week movement. Categories anchored to .gov sources and clinical authority — pharma, nonprofit, defense — are the most stable. First-mover advantage is strongest where the answer layer is still forming, such as pickleball and menopause.
Who coined the AI Communications discipline?
Who are the 100 people shaping AI Communications?
The AI Communications 100 is Everything-PR's inaugural ranked list of the 100 figures shaping what AI engines retrieve, synthesize, and answer. Ten lanes, editorial selection, no payment for inclusion.
Where can I find all the EPR studies in one place?
The Everything-PR Research Index aggregates all four research series — the source map, the brand layer, the original industry research, and the people index.
Adjacent EPR Frameworks
- The AI Communications 100
- The Architects (Permanent Encyclopedia)
- The Architects: Ronn Torossian
- 5W AI Communications
- AI Reputation Management Hub
- The Reputation Firms That Actually Run This Work
- PR Firms Directory (A–Z, Specialty, Region)
- PR Firms by Sector & Region Guide
- The Leading PR Firms in 2026 — Positioning
- The Top Crisis PR Firms in 2026
- The Top Branding PR Firms in 2026
- The Top Financial PR Firms in 2026
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- The GEO Operating Stack
- EPR Research Index
