B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
84%
84% -- share of ai citations from earned media for AI-cited links (2026)
Earned media accounts for roughly 84% of AI citations based on an analysis of 25 million AI-cited links.
Attribution:
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Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
84%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Sample Size
25,000,000
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
Muck Rack
Primary
Tier B
https://rctrl.com/blog/ecommerce-aeo-dtc-ai-product-recommendations ↗
Source Article
Ecommerce AEO: Win AI Product Recommendations (DTC)
A DTC founder's usual first contact with ecommerce AEO is an email: a customer mentions they found the product by asking ChatGPT what to buy. Nothing in the analytics predicted it, and nothing in the analytics recorded it either. The scale behind those emails is now measurable: Salsify's 2026 consum…
Original Research
Muck Rack
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Muck Rack analysis of 25 million AI-cited links
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
AI-cited links: 84% share of ai citations from earned media. Source: Muck Rack (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/earned-media-share-ai-citations
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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/earned-media-share-ai-citations" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>84%</strong> -- share of ai citations from earned media for AI-cited links<br><small>Source: Muck Rack (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/earned-media-share-ai-citations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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