B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
78.4%
78.4% -- share of question linked citations from headings for ChatGPT (2026-02)
78.4% of question-linked citations in ChatGPT came from headings.
- Based on analysis of verified citations from ChatGPT responses
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
·
How we verify data →
Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
78.4%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026-02
Entity
Sample Size
18,012
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
Growth Memo (Kevin Indig)
Primary
Tier B
https://www.visibilitystack.ai/academy/content-engineering/how-llms-retrieve-your-content ↗
Source Article
How AI Search(LLMs) Finds Content: RAG, Embeddings Explained
TL;DR
- AI search does not evaluate your whole page at once. It evaluates individual passages pulled from your page. Every section you publish is a standalone competitor for citation.
- Passages get matched to queries by meaning, not keywords. A section that says one thing clearly will outperform a …
Original Research
Growth Memo (Kevin Indig)
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Kevin Indig analysis of 1.2 million ChatGPT responses and 18,012 verified citations (Growth Memo)
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
ChatGPT: 78.4% share of question linked citations from headings. Source: Growth Memo (Kevin Indig) (2026-02). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/chatgpt-citation-headings-2026
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/chatgpt-citation-headings-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>78.4%</strong> -- share of question linked citations from headings for ChatGPT<br><small>Source: Growth Memo (Kevin Indig) (2026-02) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/chatgpt-citation-headings-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
Share
Use this data in your work
Copy the citation, embed the widget, or explore thousands more verified marketing statistics -- all free.