If you had one hour to move your brand's AI citation rate up, where would you spend it? On the website? Or off it? Across the 339 Indian brands in the Cited Index, a single brand's own website is only a sliver of its category's citations, near 0.1% for the median brand. That sounds like a mandate to spend everything off-site. It is not, because the share of a category's citations that land on brand websites at all swings enormously by what you sell. In Conversational AI, 84% of citations land on brand websites. In Audio & Wearables, only 27% do, and the rest is community and editorial coverage. The right allocation depends entirely on which end you sell in.
This piece names the allocation call, category by category, and gives you a way to run it against your own category before you spend a rupee.
Key findings
- A single brand's own website is a tiny share of its category's citations (median near 0.1%). Pooled across all vendors, brand sites are the single largest source, about 55% of all citations.
- Per-category brand-site share ranges from 27% (Audio & Wearables) to 90% (HR & Payroll), a 63-point spread
- Brand-site-dominated categories (HR & Payroll 90%, Conversational AI 84%, CRM & Sales 84%) reward on-site work as the primary investment
- Off-site-dominated categories (Audio & Wearables, Travel & Luggage, Personal Grooming) reward off-site work, and the off-site is now community and editorial first, not marketplaces, which peak at 20%
- Yellow.ai, the number-one brand in Conversational AI, wins on a brand-site strategy. Beardo, the number-one brand in Personal Grooming, wins on community and creator presence. Both are #1 in their category. Neither playbook works in the other category.
The own-site number is not the allocation number
A single brand's own website is a rounding error in its category's citations, near 0.1% for the median brand. That number lands hard on a first read, and it is the fastest way to break the founder-instinct that says the website is doing the work.
For a marketing lead deciding where to spend the next hour, though, that headline is a hazard. It suggests every brand should shift almost all of its AEO and GEO budget off-site. That is false for the B2B software categories, where brand sites carry 84% or more of all citations, and it undersells the on-site half in several consumer categories too. The right allocation call is category-specific, and it comes from a different number than a single brand's own-site share.
The category-by-category split
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The number that decides your allocation is not what share of your citations live on your own site. It is what share of your category's citations live on brand websites at all, versus what share live on marketplaces, forums, social, and editorial coverage. This is the source-type mix, and it moves a lot.
| Category | Brand websites | Marketplaces | Community & social | Editorial | Where the citation lives |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HR & Payroll | 90% | 0% | 3% | 2% | On brand websites |
| Conversational AI Platforms | 84% | 0% | 4% | 5% | On brand websites |
| CRM & Sales | 84% | 0% | 5% | 6% | On brand websites |
| Pet Care | 62% | 12% | 14% | 8% | Mostly brand websites |
| Online Learning | 59% | 1% | 23% | 4% | Brand websites + community |
| Health & Wellness | 51% | 17% | 11% | 10% | Split |
| Higher Education | 45% | 1% | 18% | 3% | Split, community-leaning |
| Baby Care | 43% | 17% | 17% | 16% | Split, off-site-leaning |
| Skincare & Beauty | 42% | 20% | 25% | 10% | Off-site-leaning |
| Personal Grooming | 37% | 19% | 24% | 16% | Off-site (community + marketplace) |
| Travel & Luggage | 36% | 10% | 24% | 24% | Off-site (community + editorial) |
| Audio & Wearables | 27% | 11% | 26% | 24% | Off-site (community + editorial) |
Read the table top to bottom. The three B2B software categories (HR & Payroll, Conversational AI, CRM & Sales) live at 84% or higher brand-site share. At the other end, Audio & Wearables, Travel & Luggage, and Personal Grooming sit near or below 37%, where the off-site majority is carried by community and editorial sources. Note what is not dominant anywhere: marketplaces peak at 20% (Skincare), a sharp change from a year ago, when a single marketplace looked like it drove a fifth of all citations. The off-site half of a D2C category is now community and editorial first, marketplace second.
The number in your row is the number that decides your on-site vs off-site budget. Not the overall own-site figure, which for a single brand sits near 0.1%.
The on-site half
In the categories where brand websites carry the majority of citations, on-site work is the primary lever. Engines are reading yellow.ai, zoho.com, and salesforce.com directly and using those pages as the answer. Yellow.ai leads Conversational AI with 49 citations and shows up in 45% of ChatGPT answers for the category, on a brand-site strategy. Their case study on this site reads what the on-site foundation looks like at 76 out of 100 on the Cited GEO Score, versus 48 for Haptik. The delta is JSON-LD schema across Article, BlogPosting, and Person, clean H2 and H3 headings, and content that reads as a definition instead of a slogan.
For these categories, the five on-site mistakes playbook is the shortest path to a citation-rate lift: missing author attribution, thin entity content on brand and product pages, missing FAQPage schema on real Q&A, tag proliferation without pillar structure, and missing content freshness. Each fix takes an afternoon. Each moves the on-site signals engines use to decide whether to lift your page as the answer.
If your category is in the top three of the table above, the on-site half is not the small lever. It is the main lever. You still need off-site work for the long tail, and Yellow.ai's Perplexity share at 13.8% is the reminder that even a category leader's on-site foundation does not close every engine (Perplexity leans on Gartner and G2 for enterprise SaaS, an off-site problem). But allocation for these categories starts on-site.
The off-site half
In the categories where off-site sources carry the majority of citations, on-site work is not the primary lever. It is the hygiene layer. Audio & Wearables citations are only 27% on brand websites; the other 73% is community and creator content (26%), editorial reviews (24%), and marketplaces (11%). Personal Grooming is 37% brand-site, with community (24%), marketplaces (19%), and editorial (16%) carrying the rest. The off-site majority in these categories is led by community and editorial, not the marketplace listings most brands assume.
For these categories, the on-site playbook is table stakes: fix the schema, add author attribution, ship FAQPage, keep the content fresh. But the AEO and GEO investment that moves the citation rate is off-site. Beardo, the number-one brand in Personal Grooming, is being cited from Reddit grooming threads, YouTube reviewer content, Instagram, and marketplace listings. Their own website is a small share of a small share. Beardo's playbook is community and creator seeding, not JSON-LD.
The off-site work by surface, plus the companion piece on where citations actually live:
- Community (Reddit, YouTube, Instagram). Real presence in the threads and creator content your category buys from. This is now the single biggest off-site lever in consumer categories, ahead of marketplaces.
- YouTube. Not owning a channel. Getting covered by reviewer channels your category buys from. Product-seeding, spec sheets sent to creators, sponsored comparison content.
- Reddit and category forums. Real subreddit presence (r/IndianSkincareAddicts, r/malegroomingIndia, r/BabyBumpsIndia, and category-specific communities). Real answers on real questions. No promotional posts.
- LinkedIn (for B2B). Long-form posts, data, LinkedIn Newsletter presence. AI engines now cite LinkedIn content in professional queries more than they cite LinkedIn profiles.
- Analyst reports and G2 (for B2B enterprise). Gartner Magic Quadrant coverage, G2 reviews at scale, Forrester and IDC quotes. This is what lifts Perplexity share in enterprise SaaS categories.
- Editorial coverage. Real publications your buyer reads (Inc42, YourStory, LBB, MoneyControl, category-specific verticals). Not sponsored listicles.
Each of these is a months-to-quarters build. That is why the allocation call matters. You cannot spend the first two quarters of a fiscal on the wrong side of your category's split.
The allocation call
Line up your category against the table and pick your split.
- Conversational AI, HR and Payroll, CRM and Sales. Put 60-70% of the AEO and GEO budget on on-site work first. Ship the Yellow.ai foundation (JSON-LD, Author schema, extractable H2 or H3 content). Then put 30-40% on the off-site pieces that lift Perplexity share and analyst coverage.
- Personal Grooming, Baby Care, Audio and Wearables. Put 70-80% of the budget on off-site work. Community and creator presence first (YouTube, Reddit, Instagram), then editorial coverage, then marketplace listing depth. Keep on-site at hygiene level (schema, author, FAQPage, freshness) but do not over-invest.
- Pet Care, Travel and Luggage, Skincare and Beauty, Health and Wellness. Put roughly 40-60% off-site with on-site at 40-50%. These categories reward both surfaces. Marketplace and YouTube coverage still matter. Brand-site content depth matters too because 35-43% of citations do land there.
If your category is not in the twelve covered by the Cited Index, you still need to run the source-mix diagnostic before you commit budget. Which lands us at the action.
One thing a marketing lead can do this week
Take five prompts a real buyer in your category would type. Run each of them against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Copy the citation URLs out. Group them by source type: brand websites (yours or a competitor's), marketplaces (Amazon, Nykaa, Flipkart), forums (Reddit, Quora), social (YouTube, LinkedIn), editorial (publications), and research (analyst reports). Divide each group's count by the total. That is your category's real source-type mix, and it is the number that decides where your next hour of AEO and GEO work should go.
If your split looks like Conversational AI, ship the five on-site mistakes playbook this week. If your split looks like Personal Grooming, put the hour into a community and creator plan instead. The overall own-site number is the reason to run the diagnostic. Your category's number is the reason you can stop guessing and start allocating.
To see the source-type mix live for your category and to track how it moves as you invest, the Cited dashboard free tier opens the same 10-category view we used to write this piece. Your brand sits inside one of those leaderboards already.