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.
Six research tracks. Every AI visibility study, citation audit, and media research document Everything-PR has published — organized by series.
AI engines are answering buyer questions right now — and most brands don't know who controls those answers, which sources the engines pull from, or where their brand stands in the citation graph. This index organizes everything Everything-PR has published on those questions into six tracks.
How to navigate this index:
→ Series A — Which publications and sources do AI engines actually pull from in your industry?
→ Series B — Which specific brands and institutions do AI engines name most in your category?
→ Series C — Original primary-source research on PR spending, federal contracts, education, gambling, and the AI industry itself.
→ Series D — Who are the people shaping what the engines say? The AI Communications 100.
→ Series E — The Citation Audit family. Methodology and applied audits of how AI engines cite specific source layers (wires, IR pages, verticals, consumer brands).
→ Series F — The AI Visibility Index Franchise. Entity-level scoring of individual figures, films, and works by Citation Share across the five engines.
📰 In the Press
"The Media Plan Is Now A Citation Plan" — Ronn Torossian, MediaPost, June 25, 2026. The Citation Audit scoring formula (40/20/20/15/5) and the three-line brief for every 2026 media plan.
New to EPR's research? Start with the conceptual foundation: What Is AI Communications? The Definitive Guide for 2026 — the discipline these studies measure.
Series A — The Source Map
Which publications, institutions, and platforms do AI engines actually pull from?
Two complementary studies. The Citation Source Index maps the global top 50 across all engines. Who Controls AI Answers drills into each industry vertical.
The AI Platform Citation Source Index 2026
680M+ citations · Five engines · 50 domains ranked
The 50 domains that compose the modern AI answer, ranked by consolidated citation share. Reddit #1 (~40%). Wikipedia #2 (26–48% of ChatGPT top-10). Forbes #5. Top 15 = ~68% of all citation share. Platform-by-platform breakdowns. The foundational source map every GEO program should be built from.
Who Controls AI Answers — The Complete Franchise Index
15 industry verticals · One source map per category
Finance · Crypto · Public Affairs · Law · Fashion · Travel · Real Estate · Tech/SaaS · Defense · Cybersecurity · Sports · Religion · Insurance · Energy · Healthcare
Series A finding: category-native publications beat legacy incumbents; .gov anchors the factual floor; Reddit dominates experience queries; named practitioners out-cite firms; revenue rank ≠ citation rank.
Series B — The Brand Layer
Which specific brands, firms, and institutions do AI engines name most often in each category?
The Citation Share Index — one method, applied consistently. Each study: ~28 entities, ~62 buyer-intent prompts, five engines. All figures labeled "Estimated ~X% modeled."
B-1 · Consumer Health & Wellness
| Healthcare | Mayo Clinic leads at 9.4. Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, WebMD, Healthline, NIH, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Epic in top 10. |
| Wellness | Podcasts, Reddit, and PubMed decide who gets cited in a $1.8T category. |
| Pharma | Drugs and manufacturers surfaced under the heaviest caution any category draws. |
B-2 · Consumer Lifestyle & Culture
| Electric Vehicles | Tesla owns category. Rivian, Lucid, Ford, GM, BYD. Reddit EV citations exceed legacy auto publications combined. |
| Streaming | Netflix scale · Disney+ family · Max prestige · Prime bundle · Apple TV+ quality. |
| Fashion | Chanel #1, Louis Vuitton #2, Hermès #3. Business of Fashion now the dominant retrieval anchor. |
| Black-Owned Beauty | Fenty, Pattern, Telfar, Honey Pot, Topicals, Briogeo, Lip Bar, Bread Beauty — 185 prompts, 5 engines. |
| Entertainment | Who owns the answer when audiences ask what to watch and who to trust. |
| Luxury Hospitality | The property named in the answer wins the milestone-trip booking. |
B-3 · Financial, Professional & B2B
| Banking | JPMorgan Chase 88.9 · BofA 86.3 · Wells Fargo 76.0. The 10-bank baseline plus methodology and Edition 2 roadmap. |
| Big Banks (extended) | JPMorgan scale · BofA consumer · Wells recovery · Citi global · Goldman IB · Morgan Stanley wealth. |
| Asset Managers | BlackRock scale · Vanguard low-cost · Fidelity retail · State Street SPDR · Capital Group active. |
| Financial Services | Who gets cited when money is on the line — advisor selection and firm comparison. |
| Tech & B2B SaaS | Structured product content and review surfaces decide the vendor shortlist. |
| AdTech & MarTech | 36 named vendors. 5 engines. 13 anchor prompts. 2026 baseline. |
| EdTech | 40 vendors. 15 anchor prompts. Flagship Citation Share Index for education technology. |
| Internal Comms (methodology) | Five dimensions, 25 buyer prompts, five engines, quarterly refresh. |
| Influencer Marketing | 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 to trust. |
| Automotive | Where legacy auto media still anchors and where native sources took the answer. |
B-4 · Retail, CPG & Platforms
| CPG | P&G scale · Unilever personal care · Nestlé food · Coca-Cola beverages · PepsiCo snacks · Mondelēz confectionery. |
| Retail | Walmart scale · Amazon e-commerce · Target design · Costco value · Home Depot DIY · Kroger grocery. |
| Reddit (cross-vertical) | 4,000 observations across crypto, finance, wellness, and B2B. Perplexity leans hardest. Claude lightest. |
B-5 · Mission-Driven & Niche
| Nonprofit | Evaluator ratings drive citation. Federated structures dilute it. |
| Crypto & Web3 | Bitcoin and Ethereum anchor. The named founder beats the anonymous team. |
Series B finding: the native source beats legacy authority every time; Reddit and primary data anchor experience queries; the named person out-cites the firm; revenue leadership ≠ Citation Share leadership.
Series C — Original Industry Research
Primary-source studies on the communications, marketing, and AI industries — built to be cited.
| AI Company Communications Study 2026 | First structured benchmark of how 15 leading AI companies communicate — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Perplexity, Microsoft AI. Transparency tiers, voice-posture rankings, disclosure asymmetry. Only 5 of 15 disclose concrete usage numbers on a regular cadence. |
| PR Spend Transparency Study 2026 | First systematic Fortune 500 PR budget estimate. ~$47B total; 0.25% median ratio; 71% disclose nothing. Sector benchmarks. Four retainer tiers. |
| Federal Agency PR & Communications Spend Transparency Study 2026 | First systematic accounting of federal PR contracts. Pure-play PR = $376.7M across 201 vendors. Army/Air Force/Navy recruitment alone = $5.2B+. Omnicom + IPG control ~$1.35B. |
| Saudi Arabia Marketing & Brand Study 2026 | 42-page study. $64B national brand investment; $2.54B ad market; $81B tourism revenue; $941B PIF. Built for decision-makers through Expo 2030 and the 2034 FIFA World Cup. |
| 5W PR & Marketing Education Study 2026 | 36-page free report. 10 Tier 1 programs graded on AI integration; salaries across 11 cities. BU, Columbia SPS, NYU SPS, U Denver lead. |
| 5W Responsible Gambling Communications Audit 2026 | 47,000+ media articles, 180+ ESG disclosures, 2,400+ AI queries. Industry-wide 8.7:1 marketing-to-RG spend ratio. MGM 81/100, DraftKings 71/100, FanDuel 66/100, ESPN Bet 38/100. |
Series D — The People
Who are the 100 figures shaping what AI engines retrieve, synthesize, and answer?
The AI Communications 100
100 figures · Ten lanes · Annual ranked index · Inaugural 2026 edition
Lab principals, answer engine builders, policy architects, critics, open-source operators, journalists, lab communications and safety evaluators, discovery infrastructure, investors, and foundations. Editorial. No payment for inclusion. Refreshes annually with quarterly interim updates.
Lane deep-dives:
- Methodology — the three filters and curation rules
- Lanes 1 & 2: Lab Principals and Model Builders
- Lanes 3–6: Policy, Journalism, Research & Editorial
- Lane 7: Lab Communications, Safety & Evaluation
- Lane 8: Discovery Infrastructure
- Lanes 9 & 10: Investors and Foundations
- 2026 vs 2027: How the List Will Change
Companion encyclopedias: The Architects (living practitioners who built modern communications) and In Memoriam (the founders who built the field and are no longer with us — Bernays, Burson, Edelman, Rubenstein, Finn).
Series E — The Citation Audit Family
EPR's longitudinal study of how AI engines cite specific source layers. Methodology first, audits second.
The Citation Audit family answers a different question than the Citation Share Index (Series B). Series B asks which brands get named. The Citation Audit family asks which source layers the engines pull from to construct the answer — wires, IR pages, vertical-specific authority graphs, consumer brand-association studies. Each audit is reproducible, prompt-and-engine documented, and published with a Phase 2 commitment.
| The GEO Citation Audit: Six-Step Methodology | The foundational methodology. A Citation Audit is the GEO equivalent of a baseline keyword report — end-to-end six-step framework that every applied audit in this family runs against. As published in MediaPost. |
| The Wire Service Citation Audit 2026 | How Claude and Google AI Overviews cite PR Newswire, Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Newsfile, and ACCESS Newswire. GlobeNewswire 31.3% · Business Wire 18.8% · PR Newswire 16.7%. Newsfile and ACCESS Newswire win their target verticals outright. |
| The IR Page Citation Audit 2026 | How AI engines cite corporate investor relations pages. Financial services ~100%. Biotech ~92%. Mega-cap consumer tech and junior mining ~0%. The IR-hosting vendor matters. |
| The Vertical Citation Audit | Cross-industry study measuring how brands appear in AI engine answers across seven verticals: luxury hotels, universities, fashion, hospitals, restaurants, law firms, and financial advisors. Modeled Citation Share across all five frontier engines. |
| LLM Citation Audits: 100 Consumer Brands | Study of 100 consumer brands and four answer engines. Legacy brands underperform digital challengers by 32% on Citation Share. The role of structured presence across Wikipedia and Reddit. |
Series E finding: editorial rewrites beat primary-source documents in AI engine retrieval — at every layer of the corporate communications stack. Wires, IR pages, and category-native authorities all show the same pattern. Category structure determines the outcome, not the source-layer investment.
Series F — The AI Visibility Index Franchise
Entity-level scoring of individual figures, films, and works by Citation Share across the five engines.
Series B measures which brands get named inside a category. The AI Visibility Index Franchise goes one level down — scoring individual entities (a specific actor, film, founder, athlete, product) against the same five-engine grid. Different scoring composite: Frequency (40%), Rank (25%), Industry Accuracy (20%), Factual Accuracy (15%). Category-by-category rollouts.
| The AI Visibility Index Franchise | Master hub for entity-level AI visibility studies across verticals. Methodology, cross-vertical findings, upcoming series. |
| The Bollywood AI Visibility Index | Five-part series measuring how AI engines cite Indian cinema. 30 stars, 5 engines. Master ranking, the Allu Arjun gap, Pushpa 2 vs Wicked, the crore problem, the prestige tier the engines cannot see. Upcoming: Tollywood, AR Rahman, OTT, Malayalam, Women of Indian Cinema. |
Series F finding: AI engines mirror the English-language press. Where the press under-covers a category — regional cinema, women in industry, prestige actors, non-Western business — the engines under-cite it. Measurable, and fixable.
In the Press
EPR research cited and authored in the marketing trade press.
- "The Media Plan Is Now A Citation Plan" — Ronn Torossian, MediaPost (June 25, 2026). The Citation Audit scoring formula (Citation Frequency 40%, Cross-Engine Breadth 20%, Query-Type Breadth 20%, Extractability 15%, Crawl Access 5%) and the three-line brief for every 2026 media plan: citation share by engine, retrieval anchors, prompt-level reporting.
How the Six Series Connect
Series A answers: which sources do AI engines pull from? Series B answers: which brands get named? Series C answers: what do the underlying industry economics, education, conduct — and the AI industry itself — look like? Series D answers: who are the people shaping the system? Series E answers: how do specific source layers actually feed the AI answer, and what changes when you measure them directly? Series F answers: how do the engines cite individual entities — actors, films, founders, athletes — inside a category?
The operating model for earning a place in the answers these studies measure: What Is AI Communications? The Definitive Guide for 2026 · GEO Operating Stack · Share of Model · AI Communications & GEO: The Practitioner's Guide.
