We measure the Cited Index across 339 Indian brands and five AI platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode. One number from the latest edition should shape how you spend your GEO budget.
0.13%.
That is the median Indian brand's own website as a share of the AI citations in its category. The average brand sits at 0.65%, and 78% of brands fall below one percent. Ask an AI engine a buying question in your category, and the odds that any given answer cites your own site are close to a rounding error.
This is not a local quirk. Microsoft Advertising's "Discovery to Influence" GEO research put owned-domain share near 4% across millions of global citations. Measured brand by brand in India, it comes in even lower. Two independently built datasets, on two continents, land on the same shape: your own website is a sliver of where AI gets its answers about you.
If you are an Indian D2C founder or a B2B SaaS marketer, that should change how you think about AI visibility. But the more useful finding is what happens when you stop looking at one brand and look at the whole category.
The number that looks like a contradiction, and isn't
Here is the twist. Pool every vendor's own website together, across all brands in a category, and brand sites are the single largest citation source in the Index: 54.8% of all citations. More than marketplaces, community, editorial, and everything else combined.
So which is it? Is your website 0.13% of citations, or is it 54.8%?
Both, and the gap between them is the whole story. "54.8%" counts every brand's site pooled together. "0.13%" is your site alone. In a category answer that recommends ten brands and cites a dozen vendor pages, most of those pages belong to your competitors. From your seat, a citation to a rival's site is not your citation. It is third-party.
What matters is not whether AI reads brand websites. It clearly does. It is whose website gets read, and that splits cleanly down one line.
The split: B2B sites get read, D2C sites don't
| Category | Share of citations on vendor sites | Read this as |
|---|---|---|
| HR & Payroll | 90% | AI answers are assembled from vendor documentation |
| CRM & Sales | 84% | Same. Owned content is the lever |
| Conversational AI Platforms | 84% | Same |
| Pet Care | 62% | Mixed |
| Online Learning | 59% | Mixed |
| Health & Wellness | 51% | Mixed |
| Higher Education | 45% | Directories and community rising |
| Baby Care | 43% | Marketplace and social heavy |
| Skincare & Beauty | 42% | Community and social heavy |
| Personal Grooming | 37% | Community and social heavy |
| Travel & Luggage | 36% | Marketplace and community heavy |
| Audio & Wearables | 27% | The most contested category in the Index |
In B2B SaaS, AI assembles its answers largely from what vendors publish about themselves: product pages, docs, comparison content on their own domains. The citation lives on a vendor's website. The job is to be one of the cited vendors, and owned content is exactly the lever that gets you there.
In D2C, the same engines behave completely differently. Brand sites are a minority, bottoming out at 27% in Audio & Wearables, and the rest is earned into: marketplaces, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, editorial. You cannot publish your way onto those surfaces from your own domain. You have to earn your way in.
The split holds across all twelve categories, and the August 2026 Cited Index maps it in full. Same benchmark, opposite playbooks.
Where the D2C citations actually go
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We pulled the top-cited domains for every category. For consumer categories, the pattern is community and social, not the marketplace most people expect.
| Category | Top-cited domains |
|---|---|
| Audio & Wearables | youtube.com (11.4%), reddit.com (9.8%) |
| Travel & Luggage | youtube.com (10.4%), reddit.com (8.7%), amazon.in (5.3%) |
| Skincare & Beauty | instagram.com (10.7%), reddit.com (7.8%), nykaa.com (5.7%) |
| Personal Grooming | reddit.com (8.5%), youtube.com (7.4%), instagram.com (7.2%) |
| Pet Care | supertails.com (12.0%), amazon.in (7.0%), reddit.com (6.8%) |
| Baby Care | instagram.com (7.6%), amazon.in (5.8%) |
| Health & Wellness | amazon.in (7.0%), instagram.com (5.2%) |
| Online Learning | reddit.com (12.6%), youtube.com (4.1%), quora.com (3.8%) |
Two things stand out. First, Amazon is no longer the story it once was. Across the whole Index, marketplaces are 9.6% of citations and amazon.in specifically is 3.07%. It still lands in the top three for Health, Pet, Baby, and Travel, but it is not the runaway leader an earlier read of this data suggested. Community and social have taken the lead in most D2C categories.
Second, the leading domains are ones you do not own. YouTube reviews, Reddit threads, Instagram, category directories. AI reads those transcripts and threads and serves them back as the answer.
The YouTube factor
The single strongest off-site predictor of AI brand visibility is not on your website. It is on YouTube.
Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study found YouTube mentions correlate at 0.737 with AI visibility, the highest of any factor they measured, ahead of branded web mentions (0.656 to 0.709). Backlinks correlate weakly. Ahrefs state directly that correlation is not causation, and their sample is filtered to brands with a domain rating above 40 and at least 800 monthly brand searches, so it describes companies that already have search demand. I went through what that study does and does not show.
The Cited Index backs the direction for Indian consumer categories. YouTube is the top-cited domain in Audio & Wearables (11.4%) and Travel & Luggage (10.4%), and a top-three source in Personal Grooming and Higher Education. When a creator spends fifteen minutes reviewing a product, that transcript holds more structured brand information (ingredients, comparisons, honest use cases) than most brand catalogues do. AI models extract from it directly.
India has more than 500 million YouTube users, the largest national audience on the platform. It is where Indian consumers research purchases, and now it is where AI models go to decide who to recommend.
Mapping it to the 3-Layer Stack
This maps onto the 3-Layer AI Visibility Stack, with one correction to how people usually read it.
| Stack Layer | What it covers | Where it matters most |
|---|---|---|
| Layer 1, Discoverability | Schema, llms.txt, structured content, technical SEO | Everywhere as hygiene. Decisive in B2B, where vendor sites carry 84 to 90% of citations |
| Layer 2, Citability | Content quality, definitive statements, original data | The bridge. Makes your own content worth citing and worth talking about |
| Layer 3, Authority | YouTube, press, reviews, Reddit, marketplaces, LinkedIn | Decisive in D2C, where most citations live off your domain |
The old shorthand was "your site is 4%, the other 96% is off-site, so spend off-site." That is right for D2C and wrong for B2B. If you sell SaaS and pour your budget into Reddit while your product docs stay thin, you are ignoring the surface AI actually reads in your category. Match the layer to what you sell.
What to do about it
1. Audit where AI cites your category, not where you would like it to
Run the prompts your customers actually type. See which domains the engines pull from. If most of your category's citations come from Reddit and YouTube, optimising your blog is not the lever, and your presence on those surfaces is. If you sell B2B SaaS and vendor sites dominate, your own documentation and comparison pages are the lever. The Cited Index does this audit publicly for twelve categories. If yours is not covered, request a free audit and we will run the data for you.
2. Build YouTube presence, even if you do not make videos
You do not need a channel, you need coverage. Send products to creators and provide data for their review videos. Make it easy for creators to talk about you accurately with clear specs and talking points. If you do run a channel, make it entity-rich: explainers, comparisons, expert interviews. AI models extract from transcripts, so make yours worth extracting from.
3. Earn press and review coverage systematically
Trakkr's analysis of 30M+ prompts is blunt: getting featured in traditional publications is one of the fastest ways to lift AI visibility. Not guest posts on low-authority blogs. Real editorial coverage in the publications your buyers read. For Indian brands, target the category press: Inc42, YourStory, LBB, MoneyControl, the beauty verticals, and the B2B publications your buyer actually opens.
4. Build Reddit and LinkedIn presence with substance
Reddit is now one of the top three cited domains across the major AI platforms. LinkedIn leads for professional queries. Both reward substance over promotion. On Reddit, answer real questions and never hard-sell, because the community will bury you and AI will read the negative sentiment. On LinkedIn, publish data-driven long-form. AI cites what you publish more than how your profile looks.
5. Do not abandon on-site work, especially in B2B
If your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, nothing else works. If you have no schema, AI cannot parse your entity information. If your content is hedged and generic, AI will not cite it even when it finds it. In D2C this is table stakes. In B2B it is the main event, because the citations are landing on vendor sites and you want them landing on yours.
The bottom line
Your own website is a rounding error in your category's AI citations: 0.13% for the median brand. That is the number that should stop you optimising in a vacuum.
But the follow-through is not "abandon your site." It is that brand sites collectively carry more than half of all citations, and whether that helps you depends entirely on what you sell. In B2B, the citation lives on a vendor's site, and your job is to make it yours. In D2C, it lives on surfaces you have to earn into, and your job is to show up where the category already talks.
Know which game you are in. Then build for that one.