What AI reads before it recommends.

AI assistants cite company websites far more than any other kind of source. In Resonance's analysis of over 1.3 million citations in AI answers about 116 B2B technology brands, about 83% pointed to company websites, with two-thirds going to other companies' sites and a sixth to the brand's own. Blog posts and articles were the most-cited type of page at 22% of citations, well ahead of product pages and documentation.

About 17% of the citations in our data went to the brand's own site, although the share depends heavily on how the question is worded. It rises to 29% when the question names the brand and falls to 6% when it doesn't, which means your site plays a small part in the category questions where buyers form their shortlists. The own-site share grew over the year, from about 8% of citations in late 2025 to 21% by the third quarter of 2026.

Pages with FAQ markup were cited 36% more often on average than pages without it, which was the largest gain linked to any single feature in our audit. Pages with a visible updated date were cited 26% more, and pages with lists 24% more, while tables were linked to a smaller gain of 16%. These are associations that don't prove cause, because well-resourced sites tend to do all of these things and usually have stronger content and more links as well.

Longer pages were cited more often in our data, and the gap between the shortest and the longest pages was wide. Pages over 5,000 words averaged about six citations each, compared with about three for pages under 500 words. The most-cited 10% of pages had a median length of about 1,700 words and used more headings than pages that were cited only once.

Among pages with a detectable publish date, the typical page was about five months old when an assistant cited it. Four in ten were under three months old and three in four were under a year old. News goes stale fastest of all the sources we looked at, with technology news usually cited within about 18 days of publication. Trade features and company pages, by comparison, stayed in use for months.

Beyond company websites, the assistants cite review sites such as G2, Capterra and PeerSpot, forums such as Reddit and Hacker News, reference sources such as Wikipedia and arXiv, and YouTube. They also cite blogging platforms such as Medium and Substack, along with news and trade media, and together these sources make up about 17% of citations. Each assistant has its own mix, with Gemini and Perplexity citing YouTube and Reddit far more often than ChatGPT, which hardly cites video at all.

They do, and the differences are large enough to change which of your pages get read. ChatGPT leans on documentation, which makes up 16% of its citations, and on product pages at 14%, and it rarely cites best-of lists or comparison pages. Perplexity gives 29% of its citations to blog posts and about one in seven to best-of lists and comparison pages combined, and both Perplexity and Gemini cite YouTube and Reddit far more often than ChatGPT does.

Publish pages that answer the questions buyers ask, especially the category questions that don't mention you by name. In our analysis of over 1.3 million AI citations, the most-cited pages put the answer first and went into real depth, and they were more likely to use FAQs and tables and to show an updated date. It also helps to publish fair comparison pages yourself and to refresh key pages every quarter. Coverage on the review sites and trade media that AI reads supports all of this, because those are the pages you can't write yourself.

No assistant publishes a list of ranking factors, although the pages AI cites most do share some clear patterns. In our data, pages with FAQ markup averaged 36% more citations and pages with a visible updated date averaged 26% more. Lists and tables were linked to smaller gains, while longer pages were cited more often and most of the pages the assistants cited were under a year old. These are associations that don't prove cause, so we'd treat them as the habits of well-kept pages.

Generative engine optimisation, sometimes called answer engine optimisation (AEO) or LLM SEO, is the work of getting your brand and content cited in answers from AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews. It overlaps with SEO, although it depends more on third-party sources, clear answers and content that the assistants can quote directly. Our research shows which sources the assistants actually cite when buyers ask about B2B technology.

Agentcy, Resonance's AI visibility platform, asked eight AI assistants, including ChatGPT and Gemini, the kinds of questions B2B buyers ask, and recorded every source they cited. The data covers almost 190,000 answers to about 67,000 questions asked between October 2025 and September 2026. We sorted the cited sites and pages by type and audited about 190,000 cited pages for features such as FAQs, tables, visible dates and length.