Citation Reach Beats Domain Authority for AI Citations

Dubai-based AI visibility firm Wellows published its own study of citation patterns across five AI engines on October 9: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. The study drew on 9,471 English-language prompts across 151 topics, collecting 382,176 AI answers between January and June of this year, and tracked 92,112 websites that appeared in those answers.

The methodology split prompts within each topic into two groups, then checked whether a site cited in one group was also cited in the other. The goal was to see which signal best predicted whether a site would keep getting cited.

The strongest predictor across all five engines turned out to be "citation reach," meaning how often a site was cited across different, unrelated topics rather than within just one. The correlation ranged from 0.29 to 0.37, beating both how deeply a site covered a single topic and a stored domain authority score.

The gap between citation reach and authority score was widest on Perplexity, where the reach-based measure scored 0.25 against 0.15 for authority. ChatGPT showed the weakest signal for topic depth among the five engines, at 0.043 compared with 0.208 for Google AI Overviews.

That result points away from the "go deep on one topic" strategy often recommended for AI citation. Instead, it suggests being cited consistently across several unrelated topics is a better predictor of future citations than depth in any single one. Wellows said tracking this metric per site could help estimate which pages are likely to be cited next.

Khadija Zaman, Wellows' AI Search Manager, said "a site an engine cites on one topic is more likely to be cited on the next prompt." She added a caveat: "That is an association in our data, not a recipe."

This is a self-published study distributed through a press release, from a company that sells AI visibility tracking as a product, which is worth keeping in mind when weighing the findings. Still, the scale, more than 380,000 answers and over 92,000 sites, makes it a data point worth noting.

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The takeaway is less about chasing a single authority score and more about tracking how many different topics a site's content is already being cited on. Rather than concentrating purely on one niche, keeping an eye on citation spread across topics may be the more useful signal going forward.

Source: ACCESS Newswire (Digital Journal), October 9, 2026. Checked October 15, 2026. Read the original