As one study shows, sponsored thought pieces make very little difference to citations made by AI assistants, which all produce varying results.
TL;DR: make your firm’s owned media crawlable.
The fourth edition of Muck Rack and Generative Pulse’s “What Is AI Reading?” series looked into how AI assistants choose their sources.
As it turns out – from analysis of over 40 million AI responses and 207 million citations since January – bought placements barely register in AI-generated answers. This was supplemented with 1,020 unbranded prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
Around 99% of cited links came from non-paid sources while paid or advertorial content account for only 0.3% of citations – a figure unchanged since May.
Over 84% came from earned or third-party sources, a share which has stayed between 82% and 89% across every edition of the study. Owned media (a firm’s own website and publications) rose modestly from 13.7% to 15.2%.
Journalism citations are also falling, from 27% to 22%, driven by ChatGPT and corporate third-party content, aggregators, and NGO sources picking up the slack.
Interestingly the assistants seem in disagreement with each other. Only 212 domains were cited by all four, and when the same prompt was repeated within a day, ChatGPT reused 41% of its cited domains, Gemini 45% and 94% for Perplexity.
Among major publishers that block Claude’s search crawler, 81% received almost no Claude citations compared to the 12% of those that allowed it.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
If the study’s pattern holds for institutional investors’ queries via AI tools, a sponsored placement or piece of paid thought leadership will not contribute much to what said tools say about a firm.
It is always good practice to regularly audit what assistants are saying at that point in time. To do so, run unbranded queries likely to be asked by an allocator (“emerging markets credit manager with strong risk controls”) and see what domains appear.
Considering assistant’s varying citations, it is also useful to track visibility over time and across each channel. No single answer will be definitive.
Similarly, it is worth investing in earned and third-party presence – consultant and database profiles, trade-press commentary by your PMs, and conference and academic mentions – while keeping a fund website crawlable and substantive helps to boost the value of owned medi. Blocking AI crawlers might cost you citations.
Always remember that AI-surfaced content also carries risk exposure, so material that does get cited needs to be approved and timely.
Source
GlobeNewswire, “Generative Pulse: Earned Media Still Drives More Than 84% of AI Citations”
