Studies · Epovest

Aug 18, 2026

Six AI engines, one question, and almost no sources in common

Asked the same question on the same day, two AI engines share 6.4% of their cited sources on average, and no pair of the six reaches 13%. Measured on 2,883 answers, July 27 to August 14, 2026.

Aug 6, 2026

When nobody writes about you, AI answers with your namesake's reputation

Twelve entities sorted by how much independent coverage exists about them, put to six AI engines on 6 August 2026 with a neutral question and an adversarial one: 144 answers. Every thickly covered entity drew criticism unprompted. On thinly covered names the criticism that comes back belongs to somebody else, sourced and stable.

Aug 4, 2026

When an AI recommends a professional, 62% of the sources it cites are that professional's own site

Five recommendation questions put on 2 August 2026 to the AI engines that search the web: 225 answers, 1,813 cited sources, 264 domains. The professional's own site holds 61.9% of them, the directory 30.4%, the press 6.0% and the social network 1.7%. The breakdown by trade, and the domain classification method.

Aug 3, 2026

Your chances of being cited vary more than fivefold depending on which AI answers

An answer from one AI engine names 13 sources. An answer from another names 2. Between the two sits a factor of 5.6, and two numbers explain all of it: AI Coverage, how often an engine cites anyone at all, and AI Density, how many it names when it does. Measured on 1,949 answers between 6 July and 1 August 2026.

Aug 1, 2026

The intermediation layer: 80% of the sources behind AI travel recommendations are third parties

Across 204 answers from six AI engines to 20 category-discovery questions in leisure travel, 1,943 cited sources partition mechanically: 19.5% are the site of a professional the answer ranks, 80.4% are third parties. The 397 third-party domains, named and counted.

Jul 31, 2026

Reddit in AI answers: Gemini's most cited domain, three citations out of 1,945 on ChatGPT

Across 1,427 archived answers, reddit.com tops Gemini's citations, ranks second on Perplexity, 102nd on ChatGPT and never appears on Claude. The measured map, and the licensing, robots.txt and court record behind it.

Jul 26, 2026

What AI assistants actually cite: the site profiles behind the answers, engine by engine

923 archived answers, four engines, 2,049 domains cited: the web AI answers stand on is far more open than assumed, and each engine trusts a different profile of sites. Measured in July 2026.

Jul 25, 2026

Backlinks and AI visibility: what the link still buys, and what corroboration wins without it

Generative engines learn who you are from co-occurrence, not from hyperlinks: an unlinked corroboration already moves their answers. What the 2024-2026 studies, the engines' documented pipelines and our own surveys show, and what the link still buys, door by door.

Jul 24, 2026

YouTube in AI answers: why Gemini and Perplexity quote videos, and what they actually read

Across 883 answers archived between July 10 and 24, 2026, youtube.com is the most cited source on Gemini and on Perplexity, and absent from 1,655 citations on the other engines. What part of a video the engines read, and what that makes worth doing.

Jul 20, 2026

Why AI visibility can no longer be inferred from search rankings

For two years, AI assistants leaned on classic search indexes, so ranking well meant being visible in AI answers. That proxy is breaking: each assistant now assembles its own retrieval pipeline. Where AI answers come from in 2026, and what it changes.