I measured which websites AI assistants actually cite. Here is the list.

Everyone is talking about getting recommended by ChatGPT and Perplexity. I could not find anyone who had measured it, and the tools that do it start at $150 a month, so I wrote a script instead. It cost about a dollar in API calls.

Here is what I did. I wrote down 31 questions a customer of mine would actually type into an assistant, in their words, not mine. Then I sent every question to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, all with web search on, and saved the full answers. 124 answers in total. Then I pulled out every URL the assistants cited.

The result surprised me. These are the domains the four assistants leaned on most, counted across all 124 answers:

- Vendor websites and docs, by a wide margin

- github.com, 40 citations

- reddit.com, 27

- dev.to, 17

- Individual blogs, 5 to 9 citations each

Three things I took from it.

Your own site works, if you write. My domain was cited 11 times, and every one came from Perplexity reading pages I had actually published: the docs, the crawler policy, three blog posts. Not the homepage. The pages that answer a specific question are the ones that get quoted.

Reddit is enormous and free. 27 citations, all from Perplexity. The specific threads were people posting "I built a tool that does X" in r/LangChain, r/mlops and r/ChatGPTCoding. Those posts are two years old and still being read back to people as recommendations today.

One person can own a query. A single developer's comparison post on his personal blog was cited 4 times across different questions. He is not a company. He wrote one good article and the assistants now use it as a reference for the whole category.

What I would do differently if I were starting: stop optimising the homepage and write the specific pages. The assistants do not cite what you are, they cite what answers the question.

Happy to share the script if anyone wants to run it on their own category. It is about 300 lines and reads its keys from a file.