The data
This is the second half of our case study of a mid-sized software engineering services company. The data is the same: nine weekly scans from 17 August to 12 October 2026, 399 prompts, ChatGPT and Claude every week and Gemini for the last eight, each on a small, low-cost model, with web search on, in English, as from the United States. That is 10,344 answers. We do not name the company, its competitors or the sites that compete with it for attention.
For every answer we kept the sources the assistant cited, each counted once per answer. Across all answers that is 110,850 citations. Where a figure below is about a site, it counts the answers that cited it.
Three piles: own site, competitors, everyone else
| Cited source | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The company’s own site | 559 | 0.5% |
| The seven tracked competitors’ sites | 1,203 | 1.1% |
| Everyone else | 109,088 | 98.4% |
“Everyone else” is a very long tail: 18,785 different sites. 9,199 of them were cited exactly once in nine weeks. The ten most cited of them together took 9.7% of the third-party citations. There was no single source that the answers depended on.
The company’s site was cited in 512 answers, and a competitor’s site in 920. By assistant the balance was very different: ChatGPT cited a competitor’s site in 505 answers and the company’s in 91; Claude in 289 and 300; Gemini in 126 and 121. Most of ChatGPT’s competitor citations went to the far larger Competitor A.
Each assistant reads differently
The three assistants did not just cite different sites. They cited different amounts.
| Assistant | Answers with sources | Sources per answer, on average |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 3,582 of 3,582 | 6.0 |
| Claude | 3,510 of 3,576 | 20.4 |
| Gemini | 2,621 of 3,186 | 6.9 (sites) |
To see what kind of sites they chose, we sorted the 40 third-party sites cited in the most answers by hand. Nine were technology platform vendors and their documentation, eight were consultancies and analyst firms, eight were research and reference sites (papers, patents, standards, an encyclopedia), eight were other software development firms, three were publishing and video platforms, two were trade media, and two we could not place.
- ChatGPT gave about a third of all answers, but half of the answers citing the consultancies and analyst firms (52.5%) and of those citing the platform vendors (51.2%).
- Claude gave about two thirds of the answers citing the research and reference sites (65.7%) and 70.2% of those citing the eight other development firms.
- Gemini was the one that cited video and forum sites: a video platform in 159 of the 174 answers that cited it, a large discussion forum in 104 of 118.
The eight development firms are worth a second look. None of them was on the company’s competitor list, yet their articles, service pages and “top firms” lists were among the most cited sources for its questions. In citations, the company was competing with firms it did not track. In Teddit, the Competitors page lists brands that keep turning up in answers without being tracked, for the same reason.
Review sites and directories: a small share
B2B review sites and agency directories are often named as the way into AI answers for a services company. In this data they played a small part. We checked 13 such sites by name, including a large B2B review directory. Together they were cited in 442 answers, 4.3% of the total: 366 of them Claude’s, 49 Gemini’s and 27 ChatGPT’s. The most cited one appeared in about 120 answers.
Only 31 of those 442 answers named the company. Put the other way, the company was named in 344 answers, and fewer than one in ten of them cited any of these sites. Its own pages were cited far more often in the answers that named it, as the next section shows.
This does not show that listings are useless. Our list of 13 is ours, the long tail may hold more such sites, and a model can know about a firm from a directory without citing it. It shows that, for this company and these questions, the cited path into the answer ran elsewhere.
The company’s own pages
ChatGPT and Claude cited 84 different pages of the company’s site, in 391 answers. Grouped by section of the site:
| Section | Answers citing it | Of which named the company |
|---|---|---|
| Articles (the blog) | 235 | 65 |
| Case studies | 76 | 74 |
| Industry pages | 61 | 53 |
| Service pages | 26 | 22 |
Two kinds of page, two roles. Case studies, industry pages and service pages were cited almost only in answers that named the company. Articles were cited in more answers than all of those together: 235, of which 213 were Claude’s. In 170 of the 235 the company was not named. The articles served as explanations; the case studies came with a mention.
Gemini cited the company’s site in 121 answers and named the company in 94 of them. Which pages it used is not in this data.
What it shows, and what it does not
- Almost every source behind these answers belonged to someone else, spread across thousands of sites. No small set of third-party pages decided them.
- Each assistant drew on a different part of the web. A source plan built from one assistant’s citations would miss most of another’s.
- When the company was named, its own case studies and industry pages were usually among the sources. Its articles were cited often and rarely led to a recommendation.
- The firms competing for citations were not the firms on the competitor list.
What it does not show is cause. A page that is cited in answers that name the company may be why it is named, or may be cited because the company was already going to be named. The way to find out is to change something and watch the same prompts for several weeks, as described in One scan is a sample.
In Teddit, the same evidence sits in each answer, with its sources grouped as your site, competitors’ sites and other pages, and on the Pages screen, which lists every page of your site with the answers and prompts that cited it. See Linked is not named for how to read it.