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 — attribution to Smart Money Media and a link back to the study is all we ask. 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.