The Reference Authority Report
A pilot study of 1,200 answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity, measuring which sources AI engines actually cite, and which brands they remember when they don't cite anyone at all.
Reference Authority has two surfaces: Citation Authority (what engines link to) and Model Authority (what engines have memorized). This pilot is the first measurement of both, side by side, built on our Reference Authority Framework.
Headline finding
Only Perplexity exposes a machine-readable citations array (240/240 responses, 2,806 URLs). ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok answered in prose with bolded brand names, no links. For those four engines, "reference authority" is not a backlink game; it is brand recall from training data.
Download pilot dataset (CSV)How the five engines behaved
| Engine | Obs | Avg length | URLs in text | Bolded brands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 240 | 2,192 | 2.9% | 85.0% |
| Claude | 240 | 1,758 | 1.2% | 90.4% |
| Gemini | 240 | 6,231 | 4.2% | 93.3% |
| Grok | 240 | 2,602 | 5.0% | 94.6% |
| Perplexity | 240 | 3,519 | structured | 94.6% |
Citation Authority: what Perplexity actually cites
Top 5 domains capture ~21% of all Perplexity citations (n = 2,806 URLs, 240 queries).
| Rank | Domain | Citations | Share | Query coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 330 | 11.8% | 70% |
| 2 | en.wikipedia.org | 95 | 3.4% | 29% |
| 3 | linkedin.com | 63 | 2.3% | 20% |
| 4 | reddit.com | 62 | 2.2% | 28% |
| 5 | forbes.com | 37 | 1.3% | 16% |
Source-type mix
- Brand / vendor / other1,976 · 70.4%
- Social / UGC (YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium, X)486 · 17.3%
- Gov / edu141 · 5.0%
- Encyclopedia (Wikipedia, Britannica)108 · 3.9%
- Major news95 · 3.4%
YouTube alone accounts for 11.8% of Perplexity citations, more than Wikipedia, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Forbes combined. Major news outlets account for just 3.4%.
Model Authority: what the other four engines remember
Brands mentioned across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok (n = 960 answers). Rate = share of answers containing the brand.
| Rank | Brand | Avg mention rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Microsoft | 10.5% |
| 2 | Shopify | 9.5% |
| 3 | 8.6% | |
| 4 | Google Workspace | 8.1% |
| 5 | Stripe | 7.4% |
| 6 | Slack | 7.4% |
| 7 | QuickBooks | 7.2% |
| 8 | Notion | 5.1% |
| 9 | Zoom | 4.7% |
| 10 | Salesforce | 4.58% (tie) |
| 10 | PayPal | 4.58% (tie) |
The consensus set is dominated by canonical vendors with a decade of press, product coverage, and cross-linked reference material. That's the tell: Model Authority is earned by being written about across the open web for years, the same input that PR provides.
Methodology
Sample
80 buyer-intent prompts across 13 categories · 5 engines · 3 runs per cell = 1,200 observations.
Measurement
Citations parsed from Perplexity's structured array. Brand mentions extracted via bolded-text and Title Case matching, filtered against a 500+ term stoplist.
Reproducibility
Raw row-level dataset, prompt list, and extraction scripts released under CC BY 4.0 alongside the final report.
Limitations
- Pilot sample. 80 unique prompts is directional. The full study will expand to ~400 prompts.
- Brand extraction is heuristic. Bolded text + Title Case + stoplist catches most brands but is not NER-clean. A named-entity pass will replace it in the next wave.
- Engine behavior is a snapshot. Any of the four training-data engines could enable live retrieval by default and change the picture. Findings are true for July 2026.
- Perplexity ranker opacity. Why YouTube ranks first is inferred, not confirmed by Perplexity.
- English-only, US-market prompts. Not generalizable to other locales.
Frequently asked
Want PR that builds reference authority?
The same third-party coverage that earns Perplexity citations today is what teaches ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok to name you tomorrow. Smart Money Media engineers both surfaces: earned press for citations, and long-tail reference material for model recall.
Book a 30-minute fit callPress-ready citation kit
This study is licensed CC BY 4.0. Quote it, chart it, or re-run it. All we ask is attribution to Smart Money Media and a link back to the study. Everything below is copy-and-paste ready.
Pull-quote-ready findings
- Structured citations
“Across 1,200 AI answers, only one of five engines (Perplexity) returned structured citations. For ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, reference authority shows up as brand recall from training data, not as linked sources.”
- Top cited domain
“YouTube is Perplexity's single most-cited domain in the pilot, accounting for 11.8% of all citations, more than any traditional news or trade publication in the sample.”
- Study design
“The pilot ran 80 buyer-intent prompts across 13 categories, five engines, and three runs per cell, for 1,200 total observations. Findings are directional and the full row-level dataset is public.”
Attribution & citation
According to The Reference Authority Report (Pilot), original research published by Smart Money Media (https://smartmoneymedia.org/research/reference-authority-report).Love, D., Smart Money Media. (2026). The Reference Authority Report (Pilot). Smart Money Media. https://smartmoneymedia.org/research/reference-authority-report<p>Source: <a href="https://smartmoneymedia.org/research/reference-authority-report">The Reference Authority Report (Pilot)</a>, Smart Money Media</p>Charts & images (free to republish)
Republishing & press
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Republish with attribution to Smart Money Media and a link back to this page. Email contact@smartmoneymedia.org for chart exports or interview requests.