Wellows has published a new research study examining AI citation patterns across 9,471 prompts. The study analyzed 382,176 AI answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Sites cited often on other topics also tended to receive more citations on separate prompts on all five engines, and ChatGPT showed the weakest topic coverage signal.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 9th Oct 2026 – Wellows has published a new study examining AI citation patterns across 9,471 English-language prompts and 151 topics. The research found that websites cited often on other topics also tended to receive more citations on separate prompts within the topics tested.
Citation reach, a site’s citation frequency on prompts about other topics, had the strongest association with held-out citations on all five engines, with correlations from 0.29 on Perplexity and ChatGPT to 0.37 on Gemini. Reach was more closely associated with held-out citations than topic coverage on Gemini (0.37 against 0.20) and ChatGPT (0.29 against 0.13).
Citation coverage inside a topic was also associated with held-out citations. On four of five engines, it tracked held-out citations more closely than a stored 0 to 100 domain authority score, with the widest gap on Perplexity (0.25 against 0.15). On Gemini, the two were level, at 0.20 and 0.21.
ChatGPT showed the weakest coverage signal. Among sites with similar reach, the coverage correlation was 0.043 on ChatGPT and 0.208 on Google AI Overviews.
“A site an engine cites on one topic is more likely to be cited on the next prompt,” said Khadija Zaman, AI Search Manager at Wellows and author of the study. “That is an association in our data, not a recipe. We did not test whether publishing more changes it, and we say so in the report.”
For the study, Wellows collected 382,176 AI answers to the 9,471 prompts from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode between January and June 2026. Within each topic, researchers split the prompts into two sets, measured which of the 92,112 websites were cited in one set, and tested whether that pattern carried over to the held-out set. The study is observational, and it does not show that publishing more pages, PR, or link building earns citations.
The full method, charts, and data are available in the Wellows study on topical authority and AI citations.
About Wellows
Wellows is an AI visibility platform for agencies and brands. It helps them track where they appear across AI platforms, find content and citation gaps, and close them.
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Wellows Publishes AI Citation Study Based on 9,471 Prompts
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