ESPN owns the news. Wikipedia owns the record. Reddit owns the takes. The pilot framework for the EPR Sports Citation Index — measuring sports citation share inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
SEC.gov and Investopedia are the foundation. Bloomberg, WSJ, Reuters supply the news layer. NerdWallet and Bankrate dominate the recommendation prompts. Why retail finance is run by the consumer-personal-finance press.
Four source tiers AI engines weight for consumer brand answers — structured reference data, established publishers, independent community, brand-owned pages. Tiers 1–3 carry the weight. The brand can't author them.