B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Recent
70%
70% -- earned media citation share for AI search engines (2025)
AI search engines pull 70% of citations from earned media (third-party sources).
- The study snapshot comes from August 2025 and analyzed outputs rather than underlying algorithms
- Classification of sources into brand/earned/social categories has fuzzy edges
Attribution:
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Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
70%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2025
Entity
Sample Size
5,000
Geography
North America
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
75
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
University of Toronto
Primary
Tier B
https://westoperators.com/blog/toronto-research-sep-2025 ↗
Source Article
The search visibility gap: What 5,000 queries reveal about AI versus Google | West Operators
A study that changes how we think about search
Researchers at the University of Toronto ran thousands of queries through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google. Same questions, wildly different answers. Not the content of the answers, but where they pulled their information from. In Septemb…
Original Research
University of Toronto
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Derived from University of Toronto query study of 5,000 queries across AI engines
Methodology documented
Segmentation
IndustryAI
RegionNorth America
RoleAll marketers
Channelmulti-channel
Cite this stat
Plain Text
AI search engines: 70% earned media citation share. Source: University of Toronto (2025). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-engines-earned-media-citations-2025
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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-engines-earned-media-citations-2025" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>70%</strong> -- earned media citation share for AI search engines<br><small>Source: University of Toronto (2025) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-engines-earned-media-citations-2025" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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