What AI assistants cite when buyers ask who to choose.

How these figures were collected

Every week Heddle puts the same 36 buying questions, six in each of six categories, to ChatGPT and Perplexity through DataForSEO. ChatGPT's answer is the one a logged-out US visitor sees on chatgpt.com, with web search on. Perplexity's is its sonar model, which searches the web itself.

For each answer we record the URLs it cites and count the answer once per figure, however many such links it has. Images the answer displays are not counted as citations. A ranking or comparison page is a cited URL whose path contains best, top, vs, alternatives or review. A commercial site is any cited domain that is not a platform, a reference work, a search engine, or a government or education site, so publishers count.

An answer that failed is left out of every figure rather than counted as citing nothing, and a figure measured over fewer than ten answers is not published. Moves smaller than one percentage point are not published, so a figure's date is the day its value last changed.

Measured every Monday; a figure changes on the page when its weekly reading moves by a point or more, and a move of more than ten points waits for a person to check it.

How to cite this page

Heddle, "AI Answer Citation Statistics, Measured Weekly", https://heddle.pro/statistics/ai-answers, figures as of October 22, 2026. Quote the figure with the date beside it in the table, since these move week to week.

What changed

• October 22, 2026: First reading: 16 figures from 72 answers, 36 buying questions in six categories put to ChatGPT and Perplexity on 22 October 2026, each checked by a person before publishing.