BrandGhost Observatory
Analyze your brand
The BrandGhost AI Discovery Observatory

Live data on how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity discover, cite and recommend brands across the web.

BrandGhost continuously analyzes AI responses, citations and recommendations to understand how the major AI engines see the web — and how differently they arrive at their answers.

Updated from the latest completed Observatory run· September 18, 2026
AI Citations Analyzed
7,902
Median Age of Cited Content
205d
Based on citations with detectable publication dates
Citations Under 90 Days Old
27.4%
Citations Over One Year Old
34.4%
Cross-Engine Source Overlap
~11.8%
Major AI engines often cite very different domains for the same questions.
Recommendation Sets With No Brand Overlap
41.8%
Share of comparable recommendation sets where engines shared no recommended brands.
Average Recommendation Overlap
15.1%
AI Engines Tracked
4
ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini · Perplexity
Trends over time

How AI discovery is shifting across Observatory runs

Headline metrics tracked across the most recent completed runs. Each bar is one run; the rightmost is the latest. This is where the Observatory becomes longitudinal — showing not just where AI discovery stands, but which way it's moving.

Citations Analyzed
7,902
3,453
Aug 2012 runsSep 18
Citations Analyzed: 7,902 in the latest run, up 3,453 from the first tracked run.
Median Cited Age
205d
26d
Aug 2012 runsSep 18
Median Cited Age: 205d in the latest run, down 26d from the first tracked run.
Cross-Engine Overlap
12%
5%
Aug 2012 runsSep 18
Cross-Engine Overlap: 12% in the latest run, up 5% from the first tracked run.
Recommendation Overlap
15%
10%
Aug 2012 runsSep 18
Recommendation Overlap: 15% in the latest run, down 10% from the first tracked run.

Trends cover the 12 most recent completed runs. The latest bar in each series matches the scoreboard above. Runs before a metric was reliably measurable appear as gaps rather than zeros.

Section 01

AI engines don't see the same web

Even when answering similar questions, major AI engines frequently rely on different parts of the web. This compares how often two engines cite the same domains for the same prompts.

Perplexity ↔ Claude
14.8%
Perplexity ↔ ChatGPT
10.6%
Claude ↔ ChatGPT
10%
There is no single AI search result.

Across shared questions, the major engines overlap on only a small fraction of cited domains — a reminder that AI visibility is fragmented across the web, not concentrated in one ranking.

Overlap is measured as the average share of shared cited domains between each engine pair across comparable prompts. Gemini is excluded from this comparison because its current citation representation is not directly comparable.

There's no single AI ranking to win. BrandGhost builds coordinated blog and social campaigns that represent you consistently across every engine buyers ask.

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Section 02

How old is the content AI cites?

The distribution of cited-page age across mutually exclusive buckets, for citations where a reliable publication date could be detected.

0–30 days
11.9%
31–90 days
15.5%
91–180 days
18.2%
181–365 days
20%
1–2 years
11.2%
2–3 years
5.9%
3+ years
17.3%
AI citations are not just a freshness game.

More than 34.4% of dated citations in the current Observatory run point to content more than one year old. Established, durable content still earns AI citations.

Median cited age is 205 days. Only citations with a detectable page date are included (2,821 citations).

Durable content keeps earning citations. BrandGhost builds an owned content library on your own domain — long-form SEO clusters that compound instead of reach you rent on a platform.

Build your content library
Section 03

Citation freshness by AI engine

Median age of cited pages with detectable publication dates, by engine. Engines without sufficient date coverage are omitted.

ChatGPT
133d
Claude
182d
Perplexity
226d

Median age of cited pages with detectable publication dates.

Engines reward different recency. BrandGhost schedules and auto-publishes coordinated campaigns so your coverage stays current everywhere — no copy-pasting across channels.

See how it works
Section 04

Where AI citations come from

Broad, identifiable source categories from the latest run. Source classification is still expanding, so a large share of citations remains unclassified.

News
1.3%
Reddit
1%
Academic
0.6%
Social
0.6%
Government
0.4%
Review sites
0.4%
Editorial
0.2%
Reference
0.1%
Video
0.1%
E-commerce
0%
Community
0%
News is the largest individually identifiable citation source category in the Observatory.

News accounts for 1.3% of all citations in the latest run among sources we can currently classify.

Source classification is an expanding capability. 95.2% of citations in this run are not yet assigned to an identifiable category and are excluded from the bars above rather than shown as a dominant "other" bucket.

AI cites content it can actually parse. BrandGhost structures your content for modern search and AI understanding — and surfaces the topics and buyer questions you're missing.

Find your content gaps
Section 05

How providers differ

The identifiable source mix varies by engine. Where an engine's citations can't yet be reliably classified, we say so rather than presenting misleading comparisons.

ChatGPT
Reddit
2.3%
Reference
2.1%
Video
0.3%
News
0.3%
Government
0.3%
Claude
News
1.9%
Academic
1.6%
Editorial
1.3%
Government
0.4%
Video
0.4%
Gemini
Provider source classification currently unavailable for this engine.
Perplexity
News
2.2%
Reddit
1.7%
Social
1.1%
Academic
0.9%
Review sites
0.6%
Section 06

Top public citation sources

A limited leaderboard of the most-cited recognizable domains in the latest run. This is a benchmark sample, not the full citation database.

DomainCitationsShare of runEngines
justdial.com1912.4%1
forbes.com811%3
reddit.com781%2
linkedin.com450.6%2
consumerreports.org430.5%3
yahoo.com380.5%3
homelight.com310.4%1
goodhousekeeping.com230.3%2
theindustryleaders.org230.3%3
coursera.org220.3%2
techradar.com210.3%3
realtor.com200.3%1
rtings.com180.2%3
easybear-appliancerepair.com170.2%3
startupceo.coach170.2%3
businessinsider.com150.2%1
techrepublic.com150.2%2
usnews.com150.2%2
nytimes.com140.2%1
nerdwallet.com140.2%1

These are the domains AI trusts today. BrandGhost helps you earn a place among them by building authority and an owned content library on your own domain — not rented reach on someone else's.

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Section 07

AI discovery is a representation problem, not just a ranking problem

The Observatory data suggests that AI engines frequently rely on different domains and can recommend different brands for similar questions.

For businesses, visibility increasingly depends on how consistently their products, expertise and reputation are represented across the web — not simply whether a single page ranks in traditional search.

How does AI see your brand?

BrandGhost Launchpad analyzes how your company is represented across search and AI discovery, identifies visibility gaps, and turns those gaps into an actionable content strategy.

Methodology

About the data

The BrandGhost AI Discovery Observatory runs a cross-section of consumer and business discovery questions through major AI providers and analyzes the resulting recommendations and cited sources.

Metrics shown on this page reflect the latest completed Observatory run.

Publication-age metrics only include pages where a reliable date could be identified.

Source and content classifications may have different coverage levels. Metrics with incomplete classification are explicitly labeled.

AI systems, models and retrieval behavior change frequently, so Observatory statistics should be treated as a snapshot of the current AI discovery environment.