Readers everywhere are plugging into AI to ask questions. But publishers wonder—where are the answers coming from?
From their very own sites. Answers are largely being
generated from journalism and earned media—99% of the links being cited are from non-paid sources, according to a new study from Muck Rack, “What Is AI
Reading?”
It is not clear what this information does for publishers. As they may suspect, their content is being used for these answers, but presumably they are at
least generating links.
The biggest single category of AI citations is journalistic, at 27%. Next on the list are corporate blogs and content, comprising
24%.
These are followed by aggregators/encyclopedic (17.4%), owned media (13.7%) and government (8.6%). The remaining options, academic/research, social/UGC, tech platforms, press
releases and paid/advertorial are all in the low single digits or a fraction thereof.
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The queries concern these topics:
- Industry
trend—46%
- Risk/due dilligence—25%
- Problem/discovery—24%
- Best of—23%
- How to—19%
- Comparative evaluation—18%
Of course, some industries lean on journalistic content more than
others. These sectors do so to the following degrees:Media/Entertainment—36% Finance/Insurance—32%Sports—31% Food & Beverage—31% Travel/Airline—30%Retail &
E-Commerce—30%Transportation—29% Energy—29%Government—26%Hospitality—25% Real Estate—25%Consumer Goods—24% Technology—24% Nonprofit—24%Healthcare—22%Education—18%Industrial/Manufacturing—19% Each of the three big AI platforms—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—pulls from a different set of journalistic
outlets, with only Forbes appearing in more than one provider’s top five: Forbes is fifth with ChatGPT and first with Gemini.
But the providers include citations to varying
degrees. ChatGPT does so in 96% of its responses, and includes an average of five citations in every response.
Gemini has citations in 82% of its responses, average five per
instance. Anthropic offers citations in 55% of its answers, averaging 13 sources for each one.
Here are the top-cited media outlets by provider:
ChatGPT
- en.wikipedia.com
- axios.com
- youtube.com
- kiplinger.com
- forbes.com
Claude
- U.S. News & World Report
- Yahoo Finance
- Bankrate
- Consumer Reports
- The Motley Fool (U.S.)
Gemini
- Forbes
- Healthline
- Business Insider
- The Points Guy
- Substack
Muck Rack analyzed 25,000,000+ links from AI responses.