Muck Rack Complete Report – Snipped from Executive Summary
• Citations affect responses: Simply enabling or disabling the ability for AI to search the web drastically modifies responses, indicating that the systems are truly basing their responses on the cited works.
• Journalism and earned media are important drivers: More than 95% of links cited by AI are non-paid coverage. Of those, over 27% of links are journalistic content.
• Recency wins: Particularly in OpenAI models, fresh content, especially on topical, opinion-based, or event-driven queries, is prioritized.
• Query framing changes sources: Advice-seeking or opinion-based prompts trigger more dynamic citations, while encyclopedic queries tend to fall back on older, static training data.
• Outlet authority matters: High-domain authority outlets such as Reuters, Axios and Financial Times are frequently cited, but not consistently. Sources vary by industry too with only about 15% of sources appearing in the top 10 across multiple industries.

Methodology – We analyzed 1,000,000+ links from AI responses. This study explores how modern generative AI systems cite sources in response to realistic user prompts. Our objective was to quantify and characterize the nature of AI-generated citations across different use cases and vendor models. This includes their frequency, source types, and the prominence of earned and owned media. To accomplish this, we constructed a large, diverse prompt set and executed it across several web-enabled language models, followed by systematic analysis of the responses and the cited links. The prompts span a variety of industries and subject matter. Sometimes they specifically mention companies by name, sometimes they do not. The following specific models were used to execute the queries, during the month of July 2025: Chat GPT (both ‘4o’ and ‘4o-mini’), Gemini (‘flash’ and ‘pro’) and Claude (‘sonnet’ and ‘haiku’) Generative AI systems are rapidly evolving and inherently opaque. The behaviors observed in this study may shift as models are updated or retrained. We assigned cited links into categories as follows:
• Journalistic: News sites, and other journalistic coverage
• Corporate Blogs and Content: Third party corporate blogs and content not owned by a company/product targeted in the query
• Owned Media: Corporate Content created by a company/product targeted in the query
• Press Release: Press release published on any site
• Academic/Research: Scientific journals, arXiv, patents, research papers
• Government/NGO: .gov sites, public agencies, non-profit organizations
• Paid/Advertorial: Sponsored content, pages with marketing intent or sales landing pages
• Social/UGC: Social platforms (e.g., LinkedIn, Reddit) and other sources of user-generated content
• Aggregators/Encyclopedic: Sites like Wikipedia, Visual Capitalist and Britannica.com