Cited Source
A cited source is a specific web page or domain, such as a Yelp listing, a Reddit thread, or a business's own service page, that an AI engine references as the basis for its answer, showing where it learned it.
Also known as: Citation source, Referenced source
A cited source is where an AI engine points when it shows its work. Ask ChatGPT for a good family dentist in Boulder and the answer might link a Google Business Profile, a Healthgrades page, a Reddit thread about dentists in the area, and one practice's own website. Each of those is a cited source. Together they tell you what the engine read before it decided whom to name.
The mix of cited sources varies by engine and by query type. Across general keywords, Semrush found Reddit at about 40.1% of LLM citations, Wikipedia 26.3%, and YouTube 23.5% in a June 2025 sample of roughly 150,000 citations. Those are general queries, not local ones, so don't assume a plumber search in your town looks the same. For local queries, the honest picture is thinner. In one vendor analysis of 267,280 AI citations drawn from its own clients' local-marketing campaigns, the SEO tool Local Dominator found Yelp, Google, Reddit, Facebook, and Angi were the most-cited sources. That's a convenience sample, so trust the ordering more than any exact count.
There's also evidence that engines lean heavily on sources a business controls. Yext, analyzing 6.8 million citations across retail, financial services, healthcare, and food service, found 86% came from brand-managed sources: owned websites at about 44% and managed listings like Yelp and Google Business Profile at about 42%. Not contractor-specific, but a useful reminder that your own site and your own listings are the raw material.
Cited sources aren't fixed either. Reddit's share among Perplexity's top cited domains on commercial queries was about 46.7% in 2025 per Profound, and reportedly fell to roughly 24% by January 2026. Yelp disclosed a data-licensing agreement with OpenAI in February 2026. When an engine changes where it reads, the businesses it names can change with it, which is why cited sources need to be watched, not audited once.
For a small business, cited sources answer the question you can't answer by looking at your website: why did the engine name them and not me? If every answer cites Yelp and your Yelp listing is bare, that's the fix. If they cite competitors' pricing pages and you have none, that's the fix. Tibly captures the cited sources in every answer it tracks, per engine, so you can see which pages and directories are doing the work in your market.
Keep exploring the glossary
- Citation (AI answer)In an AI answer, a citation is a source the engine references or links to while generating its response, and the number of sources cited per answer varies widely by engine, from about 2.5 for Copilot up to about 7.7 for Google AI Overviews.
- Source AnalysisSource analysis is the practice of collecting every page and domain AI engines cite when answering a set of buying questions, then ranking them per engine to find which directories, review sites, and websites drive who gets recommended.
- Aggregator (directory site)An aggregator is a third-party directory or review site such as Yelp, Angi, Thumbtack, Healthgrades, or Avvo that collects listings and reviews for many businesses in a category, and AI engines frequently cite them when recommending local businesses.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the technique where an AI model first searches for relevant documents, such as web pages or listings, and then writes its answer from what it retrieved, instead of relying only on what it memorized during training.
Common questions about Cited Source
- What sources do AI engines cite most for local businesses?
- Nobody has published a clean, representative study. The best available is a vendor sample: Local Dominator's analysis of its own clients' campaigns found Yelp, Google, Reddit, Facebook, and Angi were most cited across six engines. Yext's broader data found 86% of citations came from brand-managed sources, mostly owned sites and listings.
- Do I want my own website to be a cited source?
- Yes. A citation to your own page means the engine read your facts directly rather than a third party's summary of them. Yext found owned websites were about 44% of citations in its sample. It also gives the reader a link straight to you instead of to a directory.