Which Sites AI Actually Cites in Your Category

The list is smaller than you think

Our sports nutrition study is the clearest example. We ran 40 buying-intent queries across energy drinks, pre-workout, creatine, and protein through Google’s AI Overview. Thirty-nine of them returned an answer. Across those 39 answers Google cited 108 distinct editorial domains, which sounds like a wide field until you notice that 81 of them appeared exactly once. Ninety-five percent of answers cited at least one of the same ten domains. Three of them, Forbes, Healthline, and Garage Gym Reviews, carried 77 percent of the answers between them. Brand-owned websites got 5.1 percent of citation slots, and eight of the thirty brands we tracked, several of them nine-figure businesses, were never mentioned at all. The full table is in the sports nutrition answer-share study.

Then we ran the same method on book discovery, asking the questions a reader asks when choosing what to read next. Author websites received zero of 95 citations. YouTube, Reddit, Goodreads, and Amazon led the count, social and video platforms took 31 percent, and small independent book blogs took 18 percent. Details in the book discovery study. Two categories, two completely different gatekeeper lists, and one shared lesson: the answer is being assembled from pages you do not own.

The weekend method

1. Write 30 to 50 buying-intent queries. Not “what is creatine” but “best creatine for women over 40” and “creatine monohydrate vs HCL which should I buy.” Use the phrasing a customer would type or say.
2. Run every query through three engines: Google with AI Overviews, ChatGPT with search enabled, and Perplexity. Do it logged out or in a clean profile so personalization does not tilt the results.
3. Log every cited domain per answer in a spreadsheet: query, engine, domain, and whether the citation is about your category, a competitor, or you.
4. Count frequency per domain per engine. Sort descending. The top of that list is your gatekeeper set.
5. Mark which gatekeepers already mention you, which mention competitors only, and which mention nobody specific. That third group is often the easiest to enter.

Fifty queries across three engines is 150 answers and maybe 600 citations. It is a Saturday. If you would rather not do it by hand, the AI Citation Checker runs the per-brand version and the visibility API runs it on a schedule.

What to do with the table

Read each gatekeeper’s inclusion criteria. A review site has a submission process and usually a note on what it will and will not test. A trade publication has an editor, a beat, and a contributor page. A directory has a listing form and a verification step. A comparison site has a methodology page that tells you exactly which attributes it scores. Most businesses never look, and the criteria are almost always public. Reading them turns “get mentioned on Healthline” from a wish into a checklist with three or four concrete steps.

Then build the queue. Sort your gatekeepers by citation frequency, mark the ones that already mention competitors but not you, and start there, because a site that already covers your category has a slot for you and a reason to fill it. Put the ones that mention nobody specific second; they are often a single editor away from adding a recommendation. Leave the fortress domains, the ones that only cover national brands, for last or skip them entirely. Ten targeted requests to the right five sites beat a hundred generic pitches, and the table tells you which five.

Treat Reddit differently. It showed up in 14 of 39 supplement answers and was the second most-cited domain for books, but it only works as months of genuine participation in the communities where your customers already talk. A drive-by post with a link gets removed and the account gets flagged. Answer questions for a season before your name means anything there.

Re-run the whole thing monthly and track citation rate per engine. The engines pull from different pools. Google’s AI leans on its own index and the map pack, ChatGPT on Bing and a smaller set of trusted domains, Perplexity on whatever is fresh and structured. Our AI Visibility Index tracks that divergence monthly for local categories, and it moves.

Why generic advice fails here

Every article about AI visibility tells you to get on “authoritative third-party sites.” That advice is true and useless, because which five to ten domains actually feed the answers is category-specific. Healthline matters for supplements and is irrelevant for books. Goodreads matters for books and is irrelevant for plumbers. The only way to know your list is to count it. Once you have, the work stops being a guess about where to earn mentions and becomes a short queue of specific outreach, ordered by how often each site shows up. That is the difference between doing digital PR and doing digital assets for AI search on purpose.