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Which sites really influence AI Search in the UK - and why challenger brands can win
Mike Logue
Feb 12, 2026
Welcome to my first blog
I'm Mike, one of the co-founders of Obsero. In a previous life I've been responsible for both building and leading global marketing teams and forming and growing teams of analytics professionals. And a long time before that I graduated with a degree in Statistics.
So I'm going to use my blogs to bring together these three passions: AI Search, analytics as a tool for leadership decision making and statistical research.
My topic for today… citations, and how understanding them can help a marketer drive growth in AI Search.
Why citations matter
For decades, impressions and clicks have been the currency of digital marketers. Impressions create awareness. Clicks signal intent. That's a gross simplification of how marketing effectiveness should be measured, but not of how media buys are constructed and marketing dollars allocated.
This will change in 2026, with citations becoming the currency brands and publishers will use to value content. Citations are the name given to websites which LLMs reference in a RAG (retrieval augmented generation), aka the sites the agents hit when they run a web search to answer your questions.
For brands, it's important to understand which sites are being cited in your category. Third party content is there to be influenced. Competitor content is there to be learned from. And your own content can be shaped to reflect your brand's desired positioning with agents.
And for publishers, commercial agreements will increasingly pivot to rewarding the sites who are influencing AI Search answers.
Which sites are influencing LLMs today?
For this analysis I looked at almost 200,000 citations across thousands of AI answers from ChatGPT prompts in the UK in January 2026, with all prompts being commercial in intent and with none including a brand or product mention. This is users who are in-market and who are ready to be guided to a product or service purchase.
Despite all the noise around Reddit, and the weight of traditional media in most businesses' PR plan, our findings were a real eye-opener:
Niche and specialist publishers made up 25% of all citations, context and expertise matter to LLMs
Brand sites make up a further 25% of citations, showing that your own content can shape the narrative around your business
Only 15% of citations were from traditional or mainstream media, tier 1 doesn't carry the same weight in AI Search as it does in traditional search
Reddit sits in the "other" slice with under 2% of citations coming from the most talked about domain in AI Search
Despite this, the top 10 most cited domains for the prompts we tracked read like a who's who of Tier 1 media, UGC and comparison or review sites. Wikipedia accounts for 2.3% of all citations, with category-specific media such as Forbes and Auto Express not far behind.
So why the mismatch? How do you square the circle on niche sites such as industry press and brand sites being by far the most cited, but hardly coming close to the top 10 domains? Well that's because of the long tail of sites which an LLM looks to for authority around a topic when trying to answer a hyper-specific question.
The best way to demonstrate this is by looking at the number of citations per domain for each of the site classifications. The average traditional media site is cited almost 10 times as much as the average niche publication. But far, far more niche publications are cited in AI answers.
So what does this mean for marketers? Well, before I get to that question let's have a look at how these trends differ by vertical.
The vertical your business is in has a big impact on which sites are cited
The prompts I've analysed here sit across five categories: (1) automotive, (2) finance, (3) dining, (4) wellness and (5) travel. And whilst the broad-brush statements above are interesting, the differences I found in the citation trends across these categories was fascinating:
For finance and automotive prompts, circa 40% of all citations were from specialist publications such as NerdWallet for finance or Auto Express for automotive
Travel brands have a 3 times higher chance of contributing to an AI answer than Finance brands, with brands such as Thomas Cook and Tui showing up alongside travel agents like travelplanners.co.uk
Traditional media's contribution to citations is pretty consistent at 10%-15% of all citations
I'll be sharing deep dives in to the winners, losers and growth tactics for each category in dedicated blog posts in the coming weeks.
How can marketers use this data to drive growth through AI Search?
In this post I've shown that understanding how an LLM uses citations to build its AI answers is interesting, but that consistency across verticals is non-existent. And as I dig a layer deeper in my upcoming blog posts (for example comparing banking vs mortgages vs trading platforms within Finance) you'll see that this trend continues.
The prevalence of brand sites and niche publisher content used as a basis for creating AI answers means any brand can win visibility share. This isn't traditional search where you need to be ranking in position 1-3 of Google's SERP to drive any meaningful awareness of your brand or product. Smaller brands and businesses, with a content, PR and social media plan which is tailored to being noticed by LLMs and agents can beat and are beating huge incumbents. A great example of this is Ticketmaster vs SeatPick but I'll save that example for another blog.
Creating that winning content and PR plan requires a deep understanding of your category in the eyes of agents. There is no universal rule book for understanding how LLMs recommend brands and products. Context and specificity is key. And that means that having robust data relevant to how your customers engage with LLMs and how your brand shows up in AI Search is critical.
That's where Obsero comes in, allowing you to identify the most cited domains and pages for prompts relevant to your audience, understand whether or not your brand is mentioned in those cited pages today, and identifying tactics to increase your visibility through growing cited mentions in the future.
If you'd like to learn more about how Obsero can support then get in touch!
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