We sorted 16,659 citations of brands' own sites by page
Which pages on your website do AI engines actually cite? Most advice answers with a list of pages to build. We counted instead.
The sample is every answer from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews collected from October 4 to November 5, 2026, for 200 brand websites in 122 accounts: 37,248 answers after we dropped repeated identical ones. 16,659 of their citations pointed at the tracked brand's own site.
We sorted each cited URL by its path: the homepage, blog and guides, product and service pages, help docs, comparison and alternatives pages, about pages, pricing, and terms, privacy or security pages. Anything else counted as other. Most of that is one-off landing pages under their own name.
Engines cited your site in 7% of buyer answers and 58% of answers about you
On buyer questions that don't name the brand, the engines cited its own site in 2,116 of 30,802 answers: 6.9% (6.6% to 7.2%). ChatGPT did it most, in 9.1%, then Perplexity 8.1%, Claude 5.3% and AI Overviews 4.0%.
On questions that name the brand, such as "What is X?" or "Is X legit?", the site was cited in 3,732 of 6,446 answers: 57.9%. Most of your own-site citations happen after a buyer already knows your name.
On buyer questions, the homepage drew 25% of the citations. Pricing drew 1%.
The 3,787 own-site citations on buyer questions, across 134 brands, by page type:
- Homepage: 964 (25.5%).
- Blog posts and guides: 680 (18.0%).
- Product and service pages: 397 (10.5%).
- Help and docs: 254 (6.7%).
- Comparison and alternatives pages: 189 (5.0%).
- About: 64 (1.7%). Pricing: 46 (1.2%). Terms and privacy: 37 (1.0%).
- Other pages: 1,156 (30.5%).
That isn't the 5% other studies report, because it counts something else
A March 2026 study by Wix's AI Search Lab with Peec AI sorted 1,056,727 citations from 75,000 answers and found homepages were 5.26% of them, and 0.42% on informational questions. It counted every site an answer cited, and all its prompts left the brand out.
We counted only the brand's own site. Both can be true: an engine rarely cites homepages in general, but when it cites yours at all, the homepage is the page it most often picks.
ChatGPT read the homepage. Claude read the blog.
The engines split on buyer questions. ChatGPT cited brands' homepages 549 times and their blog posts 139 times. Claude went the other way, 203 blog posts to 112 homepages, and AI Overviews too, 96 to 62. Perplexity was level at 241 and 242.
In a random draw of 30 cited blog posts, most answered one practical question: what something costs, how a product works, how to get a task done, or which options exist.
The engines also stuck to a few pages. Over the month, the median brand had five distinct pages cited on buyer questions. For the 75 brands with ten citations or more, the single most cited page took a median 25% of them.
Asked if you're legit, engines read your terms and privacy pages
On questions naming the brand, the 12,872 own-site citations shifted toward pages that vouch for the company. The homepage still led at 25.3%, then about pages at 10.7%, terms, privacy and security pages at 5.9%, comparison pages at 5.9% and pricing at 3.8%.
ChatGPT cited terms, privacy and security pages 241 times on these questions, against 70 times for comparison pages. In 25 randomly drawn examples the questions were "What is X?", "Is X legit?" and "Is X good?". The engine checks the company exists, and the legal pages say who it is.
What we'd check on your site
- Read your homepage as the only page an engine opens. Say in text what you sell, who it's for and where.
- Write guides that each answer one buyer question. They were the second most cited own page, and ahead of the homepage on Claude and AI Overviews.
- Read your terms, privacy and about pages as a stranger checking you're real: the legal name, the address, what the product does.
- If your pricing page says "contact us", that's all an engine can quote when someone asks what you cost.
How Proofsource handles it
Proofsource keeps every URL each answer cited, by engine and question, so you can see which of your own pages get read, on which questions, and which never do.
Where this could be wrong
We sorted pages by URL path, which is crude. A product page under /resources counts as a guide, and 30.5% of buyer-question citations fell into other.
Counts are citations, not brands, so a brand with one heavily cited page weighs more than one with many lightly cited ones. A citation is the page an engine showed, not every page it read.
We write each brand's questions from its own site. It's one month, four engines, mostly English questions, and brands our users chose to track, many of them small companies.
