Journalism accounted for 22% of AI citations in a study released on October 28, 2026, down from 27% in May, as government, encyclopedic and other sources gained ground.

Key Takeaways

  • More than 84% of citations came from earned and third-party sources in the study.
  • Paid and advertorial content accounted for 0.3% of citations, unchanged from May.
  • Only 212 domains were cited across all four AI providers examined.

How the mix of AI citations changed

Muck Rack and its Generative Pulse team said the decline in journalism’s share was the largest significant shift across four editions of their What Is AI Reading? study. About 99% of cited links came from non-paid sources.

Government and NGO sites rose from 8.6% to 9.6% of citations, while aggregators and encyclopedic sources increased from 17.4% to 18.3%. Academic research and third-party corporate content also gained share. The study said owned media rose from 13.7% to 15.2%.

The researchers said ChatGPT drove most of the decline in journalism’s share. Journalism fell from 28.1% of ChatGPT citations in January to 22% in September. Gemini’s share declined from 27.6% to 23.6%, while Claude’s remained in a range of roughly 24% to 28%.

What the study measured

The findings draw on Generative Pulse data covering more than 40 million AI responses and 207 million citations from January through September 2026. They also include a September collection of 1,020 unbranded consumer prompts run across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

The report’s overview of AI citations describes examining the sources cited in responses and notes that the same prompt can produce different sources each time. In the latest study, researchers found that when the same prompt was run twice in one day, ChatGPT repeated 41% of its cited domains, Gemini 45% and Perplexity 94%.

The researchers cautioned that citation behavior may change as AI models are updated or retrained.

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