Edited on Sep 6, 2026.
Citation Audit Family · Vertical Application
Methodology anchor: Six-Step Methodology · Other audits: Wire Services · IR Pages · 100 Consumer Brands · Language (Arabic, Spanish, French, German) · Full research index
Key Findings — Ranked by Citation Concentration
- Law Firms — most concentrated: a small number of BigLaw names dominate almost every tested query.
- Financial Advisors — high concentration around a handful of national wirehouses and robo-advisors.
- Universities — high concentration around a stable set of top-ranked institutions.
- Hospitals — moderate-high concentration around a few nationally recognized health systems.
- Luxury Hotels — moderate concentration; strong brand recall but engines cite specific properties over parent brands.
- Fashion — moderate concentration; heritage luxury houses share the answer with a handful of digital-native names.
- Restaurants — least concentrated: highly local and long-tail, few names repeat across markets.
What the Audit Tested
The audit ran category-relevant buyer-research prompts, "best [category] in [context]," "top-rated [category] for [use case]," "how do I choose a [category]," across seven verticals: luxury hotels, universities, fashion, hospitals, restaurants, law firms, and financial advisors. Each vertical was tested against a fixed entity set relevant to that category, run through all five frontier engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews). Figures are labeled "Estimated ~X% modeled" and read as a cross-vertical comparison, not as a live citation log for any single brand.
Why Concentration Varies This Much Across Verticals
The spread between the most and least concentrated verticals traces to how buyers actually search. Law firms and financial advisors are categories where buyers ask comparison and credential questions, "top M&A firms," "best wealth manager for [situation]," and a small set of nationally recognized names answers almost every version of that question, so citation concentrates hard at the top. Restaurants sit at the opposite end: the buyer query is almost always locally scoped ("best restaurant in [city]"), so the answer set resets by market and no small group of names can dominate nationally.
Hotels and fashion land in the middle for a related reason, brand recognition is national or global, but the actual cited entity is often more specific than the brand (a named property, a named collection or spokesperson), which spreads citation across more surfaces than a pure brand query would.
Vertical-by-Vertical Notes
Law Firms. The tightest concentration in the study. A handful of BigLaw names answer most comparison and credential queries, consistent with the pattern EPR has documented separately in the dedicated Law Firms Citation Share Audit.
