DeltaV Digital tracked 21,075 AI engine responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode between April 14 and July 13, 2026, analyzing 25,337 citations across eight industries. The findings reframe standard GEO content advice significantly.

Articles lead overall at 23.7% of citations, but the distribution hides the real signal: comparison pages show the highest citation rate at 1.87 per retrieval — nearly double the dataset average — despite making up only 4.1% of total citations. AI engines retrieve them less often but cite from them at a dramatically higher rate when they do.

The Reddit finding is categorical: it appears in the top cited domains for 7 of the 8 industries studied. Industry-specific nuance matters too — listicles earn 61% of citations in B2B tech services but 0% in healthcare. WebMD is retrieved frequently but cited at 0.33x per read; Mayo Clinic earns 1.79x per read from the same engines. Authority of a source to AI systems is not identical to authority by human traffic.

DeltaV's 25,000-citation dataset confirms what I've been advising clients: AI engines don't just reward long-form articles — they disproportionately cite from pages that structure comparisons. A 1.87 citation rate per retrieval on comparison pages, against a dataset average closer to 1.0, is a meaningful signal. If you're building content this quarter, a well-researched comparison page in a category you belong in is a higher-ROI move than another listicle.

The Reddit data is now categorical, not anecdotal: top cited domain in 7 of 8 industries. The strategy follows from that: establish a presence in the communities where your buyers ask questions, because those are now primary source material for every major AI engine.

The Google scale data from TechCrunch adds urgency to all of it. AI Overviews tripled their query coverage in a year - from 15% to 43%. AI Mode visits more than doubled. Google has fundamentally shifted from a directory to an answering system. Brands without GEO infrastructure are now invisible on nearly half of all Google searches. That is not a future risk. It is the current state.