AI Citations Study: 76% Go Beyond Brands and…

What it is.

300,000+ AI citations across six B2B SaaS brands over 90 days, tracked on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode.

76.3% of citations went to domains that were neither the brand nor its competitors. Owned citation share averaged 3.3% and competitors held about 9%.

Where those third-party citations land is concentrated: YouTube and Reddit together take 86% of the social ones, with LinkedIn at 3.2%.

Opens on Slate. Free, and the figures on this page all come from it.

Strengths

It sizes the part of the answer you can't publish your way into, which changes what a content plan is for.
Platform behavior is broken out, so you can see Claude at 54% unknown sources against Perplexity near 68%.
Sentiment is measured alongside citations, and the spread ran from 0.4% negative on one brand to 22.7% on another.

Limitations

Slate is a TripleDart product and sells AI visibility tracking.
Six brands is a small sample, and the names are withheld, so you can't check the fit against your own category.
Ninety days of platform behavior ages quickly, and the platforms changed how they pick sources during the window.

Skip this if

Skip it if you already track citation share by domain and platform and know your own owned percentage.

Ideal for