How the numbers are made

Three things we count

Sources: the pages the AI links to as the basis for an answer. A source counts once per answer, so an answer with eight links gives eight sources. Almost every number on Insights is a share of sources.

Mentions: the names (brands, products, companies) the AI writes in the text itself, whether or not they link anywhere. They are only counted in the box about names mentioned but not cited.

The AI's searches: the searches the AI itself runs before answering. The word classes (price, place, year, brand, evaluation) are shares of those. Every box is labelled with its unit.

What is counted

A citation is one source in one AI answer. If an AI answers with eight sources, that is eight citations. Shares are always of citations, not of answers, unless stated otherwise.

The AIs are Gemini, ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overview. Each analysis asks several AIs the same query and follows up with the questions the answers themselves raise.

Source types

Each source gets a source type and a page type from its address, title and snippet: fixed rules for known platforms first, then a language model for the rest. First party is producers that make or deliver what is searched for, and sellers that sell others' products. Third parties are intermediaries (marketplaces, price comparison, lists, directories, Google's cards) and content (media, reviews, forums, video, wikis).

On a sample of 80 hand-labelled sources the classification gets the source type right in 93% of cases and the page type in 90%.

What is not shown

No companies, media or keywords are named. Only public platforms (Google Business, Reddit, YouTube and the like) appear by name; everything else is shown as a type.

A market or region is only shown with at least 200 answers behind it, and cells with too little data say exactly that.

What is not compared

The keywords are not the same across markets, and neither is the mix of AIs. Differences between two sides show what the AIs actually cited, not a controlled test with the same keywords on both sides.

The numbers are updated daily from a snapshot, so the pages are stable enough to be quoted with a date.