The Citation Share Index launched with the thesis that brand visibility in AI-generated answers is measurable, trackable, and improvable. A year and 19 industry studies later, here is what the data showed.
What the index covers
Nineteen industry verticals: Law, Mental Health, Electric Vehicles, Watches & Horology, Pickleball, Menopause & Women's Health, Wellness, Pharma, Entertainment, Luxury Hospitality, Financial Services, Tech/B2B SaaS, Crisis Communications, Reputation Management, Higher Education, Automotive, Nonprofit, Crypto & Web3, and Real Estate. Each study: approximately 25 brands, 60+ prompts, five engines. All shares labeled "Estimated ~X% modeled."
Five patterns that appeared across every category
1. Category-native beats legacy. In every category studied without exception, the publication built specifically for that category out-cites the general-interest publication covering the same category. InsideEVs beats Car and Driver on EV queries. Hodinkee beats Bloomberg on watch queries. The Dink beats ESPN on pickleball queries. Archive depth × category specificity is the mechanism.
2. Named practitioners out-cite institutions. In every professional services category, named individuals with verifiable credentials out-cite the institutions behind them on expertise queries. Marty Lipton out-cites Wachtell on M&A defense. Named physicians out-cite hospital systems on clinical expertise queries.
3. Revenue leadership ≠ Citation Share leadership. DLA Piper at #3 revenue is #14 in citation share. Pfizer makes the most-prescribed menopause drugs and is nearly absent in AI answers about menopause. Scale and visibility are different assets. Communications investment is the primary driver of citation share, not market position.
4. The experience query layer belongs to Reddit. Every category with an active Reddit community routes experience queries there. Not movable by traditional PR. Influenced only by product quality and authentic community engagement.
5. First movers hold their positions. The brands and publications that established citation authority before AI engines existed have retained it despite competitive pressure and model updates. LLM citation authority is archival and sticky.
The biggest surprises
The healthcare gap is larger than expected. BetterHelp and Midi Health dominate Tier 1 on consumer health queries. The clinical institutions have not responded.
The Real Estate gap is the largest first-mover opportunity in the series. 0.14% AI Overview trigger rate. 82% of agents using AI daily. A 24-month window before the citation architecture consolidates.
The pickleball window is real and closing. The category had essentially no dominant citation anchor at the time of study. The first serious content publisher to build a genuine category-native archive in pickleball will own AI citation in the category for a decade.
Three directional signals
The first-mover advantage is compressing. The named-practitioner advantage is growing as AI engines improve entity recognition. The real-time retrieval shift is accelerating — content published this week has more citation potential than it did two years ago.
