Do you know which pages on your website AI assistants actually rely on?

Performance Communications | نوفمبر 10, 2026

Most brands don’t. We looked at 62k AI answers to car-buying questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overview in the last three months. A few things stood out:

• Manufacturers’ own sites are just 6.2% of what AI cites. Media, dealers, leasing sites and forums make up the rest.

• Within that small group of pages that are cited, there is a smaller core group that does most of the work. About 22% of pages produce 75% of citations. Toyota had 709 distinct pages cited, but just 165 of them account for 78% of its citations.

• Manufacturer sites are 12.9% of OpenAI’s citations, 8.0% of Gemini’s, 4.3% of Perplexity’s and 1.7% of Google AI Overview’s.

Citations aren’t recommendations, and this is one three-month window. But the numbers show what assistants draw on, and the truth is, your own site is only about 6% of the story.

The other 94% comes from sites you don’t control: media, dealers, leasing sites, forums and video. That’s where AI assistants get their view of your brand and your models, and it’s what Engine Room is built to show: which sources are cited for your brand, on which topics, and in which assistant.

Know your own pages. Then know the other 94%.

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