2026 AI“阅读习惯”洞察报告：基于对超过2500万条AI引用链接的系统分析

May 2026 Executive Summary ●Journalism and earned media remain the foundation of AI citations:About99%of links cited byAI come from non-paid sources. Journalism accounts for about27%of all citations. ●AI providers have distinct citation habits:ChatGPT cites sources in96%of responses, averaging 5citations per response. On the other hand, Claude cites more selectively in only55%of responses,but averages 13 citations when it does. And Gemini cites sources in82%of responses with an ●ChatGPT’s number one cited domain isWikipedia, Claude’s isPubMed Central,a free database ofscientific research, and Gemini’s isReddit. ●What you ask determines what AI cites:Questions about industry trends drive journalism citationsat more than twice the rate of how-to queries. Press releases appear almost exclusively in industry ●Journalism citations are distributed across thousands of outlets, with one exception:Axiosappears in ChatGPT's top three cited domains across 13 of 17 industries. The Associated Press Methodology We analyzed 25,000,000+ links from AI responses This study examines how generative AI systems cite sourceswhen answering realistic consumer prompts. We submittedprompts to three AI providers: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude(Anthropic), and Gemini (Google). Sometimes prompts We assigned cited links into categories as follows: ●Journalistic:News sites, and other journalistic coverage●Third Party Corporate/Blog (Earned):Third partycorporate blogs and contentnotowned by acompany/product targeted in the query●First Party Party Corporate/Blog (Owned):CorporateContent created by a company/product targeted inthe query To accomplish this, we constructed a large, diverse prompt setand executed it across several web-enabled language models,followed by systematic analysis of the responses and the cited Generative AI systems are rapidly evolving and inherentlyopaque. The behaviors observed in this study may shift as Which types ofmedia does AI cite? About 99% of linkscited by AI come Paid and advertorial content accounts forjust0.3%of all citations. Press releases The number of press release citationsdecreased since our December 2025 report(6%), but it is still near the levels seen in ourJuly 2025 report (1.2%). This is mostly due The overwhelming majority of AI citationbehavior is driven by non-paid sources. About 84% ofcitations come This includes journalism, academicresearch, government and NGOsources, encyclopedic sites like Owned and paid content togetheraccount for about16%of citations. About 27% oflinks cited by AI Over a quarter of all citations come While we expect to see some minorvariation within this range, journalismconsistently accounts for between20–30%of AI citations across all our What determines ifcontent gets cited? Different providerscite with different ChatGPT includes citations in96%ofresponses, averaging about five sources perresponse. Gemini cites in82%of responses, Claude is the most selective: only55%ofresponses include citations at all. But whenClaude does cite, it averages 13 sources per This reflects a fundamental behavioraldifference: ChatGPT is a near-universal citerthat cites concisely, but without much depth.Claude relies more on training knowledge The type ofquestion asked Industry trend queries cite journalism in46%of responses. That’smore than twicetherate of how-to and comparative queries. When consumers ask what is happening inan industry, AI reaches for news coverage.When they ask how to do something, AI There is some interesting variability aroundthe type of journalism cited in each category.Industry trend questions tend to come from Industry trend questions also tend to benewer, often published in the last six months,while how to queries can be more than two Press releases getcited the most for Press releases disproportionatelyappear in citations for queries aboutindustry trends. About1%of responsesto industry trend questions contain a Some industrieslean on journalistic Media/Entertainment leads all sectorswith36%of queries citing journalism.Industrial/Manufacturing is lowest at Education and Manufacturing, thesectors least likely to cite journalismcontent, are where AI most frequentlysubstitutes academic/research Reddit gets cited byGemini, but notChatGPT or Claude Reddit is Gemini's single most-citeddomain in this study, accounting for ChatGPT cited Reddit 16 times.Claude cited it 0 times. Reddit plays a meaningful role in Gemini'sanswer ecosystem. For the other twoproviders, it is essentially absent. Each provider pullsfrom a distinct setof sources Top cited domains by provider ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all shareWikipedia, but beyond that, the overlap Across models, there isvery littlecitationoverlap. These are three effectivelyseparate information environments. Each providercites a different Top cited media outlets by provider The top journalism outlets for ChatGPT,Claude, and Gemini share almost nooverlap. Only Forbes appears in more tha