Ask five AI engines the same Indian buying question, and you will get five different answers. That part is obvious. The part almost nobody measures is that the engines do not just phrase the answer differently. They build it from completely different sources.
On ChatGPT, the citation underneath the answer is usually a marketplace listing. On Google's AI Mode, it is a Reddit thread or a YouTube video. Same question, same category, and the engine has quietly reached for a different shelf.
We looked at 760 citations from the June 2026 Cited Index, spanning 226 Indian brands across 10 categories and five engines, and sorted every cited source into five types: brand-owned websites, marketplaces and aggregators, community and social, earned media, and everything else. Here is how each engine's citations break down.
| Engine (citations) | Brand site | Aggregator | Community & social | Earned media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (207) | 24% | 69% | 7% | 0% |
| Google AI Mode (273) | 27% | 24% | 45% | 4% |
| Google AI Overviews (152) | 55% | 34% | 10% | 1% |
| Gemini (69) | 58% | 16% | 15% | 12% |
| Perplexity (59) | 56% | 25% | 14% | 5% |
Three things in that table are worth sitting with.
ChatGPT runs on marketplaces
Sixty-nine percent of ChatGPT's citations go to aggregators. Amazon.in by itself is 74 of ChatGPT's 207 citations, more than a third, with BigBasket, Myntra and Purplle behind it. When ChatGPT answers an Indian product question, it is overwhelmingly reading a marketplace and reporting back what it found there. Your own website is a minority source, and earned press is essentially invisible.
Google's AI Mode runs on community
Google's AI Mode is the mirror image. Community and social sources are 45% of its citations, led by YouTube with 46, Reddit with 38, and Instagram with 23. The same buying questions that send ChatGPT to Amazon send AI Mode to a creator's video and a forum thread. If your brand has no presence in those places, you are missing from nearly half of what AI Mode is built to cite.
The two Google surfaces disagree with each other
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The finding that should stop a marketing team is inside Google itself. Google AI Overviews is 55% brand-owned websites and 10% community. Google AI Mode is 27% brand-owned websites and 45% community. These are the same company, often the same query, and they are pulling from opposite ends of the web. A brand that has optimised cleanly for AI Overviews can still be nearly absent from AI Mode, because the two surfaces reward different work. Gemini and Perplexity, for their part, both lean back toward brand-owned pages, at 58% and 56%.
The source almost nobody is cited for
Look down the earned-media column. It runs from 0% on ChatGPT to 12% on Gemini, and it is near zero on Google AI Overviews and only 4% on AI Mode. This is the quiet correction in the data. A press hit still does the jobs press has always done, but as a direct source of AI citations in these Indian categories, traditional earned media is the weakest of the five types across every engine. The citation weight is sitting on brand-owned pages, marketplaces, and community.
What this means before you spend another rupee
The instinct is to treat "get cited by AI" as a single task with a single fix. The data says it is at least five tasks, one per engine, and the source you should invest in changes with the engine your buyers actually use.
If your category's buyers lean on ChatGPT, your marketplace listings are load-bearing and worth treating as owned surfaces. If they lean on Google's AI Mode, your presence on YouTube and Reddit is doing the citation work, and a thin video or forum footprint is a real gap. This is where the 3-Layer AI Visibility Stack puts most of the pressure on Layer 3, Authority, which is the off-site sources you do not own. Citation Source Mix, the sixth of the Cited 8 metrics, is the number that tells you which of those sources is carrying your citations on each engine. And the mix shifts by category as much as by engine: our State of AI Search for Indian Brands report maps how D2C categories lean on marketplaces while B2B SaaS leans on brand-owned sites.
One caution the data earns. This is a market-wide picture of which source types get cited, not a proof of what causes a citation. It tells you where the engines are looking; it does not promise that flooding a channel will lift your visibility. The honest next step is not to copy this table onto your plan. It is to measure your own citations, per engine, per category, and find out which of these five diets your buyers' engines are actually on.
Methodology. 760 citations from the June 2026 Cited Index, across 226 Indian brands in 10 categories and five engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode). Each cited source domain is classified into one of five types and pooled market-wide by citation count. Because it is market-wide, there is no single "your brand" in it, so it uses no owned-versus-competitor split, and it is a different measurement from a single brand's Citation Mix inside the Cited dashboard. Shares are summed citation counts, not averages of per-brand ratios. Per-engine totals range from 59 (Perplexity) to 273 (Google AI Mode).
Want to know how your own brand shows up in AI answers? Get a free AI Visibility Report across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.