B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
91%
91% -- share of ai brand citations from external sources for AI search engines (2026)
Lantern's 200-million citation analysis found that 91% of AI brand citations originate from external sources rather than the brand's own domain.
Attribution:
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Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
91%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Sample Size
200,000,000
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
Lantern
Primary
Tier B
https://useorion.ai/blog/why-link-building-doesnt-move-ai-citations ↗
Source Article
Why traditional link building doesn't move AI citations — and what does
Why traditional link building doesn't move AI citations — and what does
Across 60 prompts in 3 industries on our own GEO Graph index, plus a converging body of independent industry analysis, one pattern keeps showing up: AI citation likelihood is gated by entity recognizability across knowledge grap…
Original Research
Lantern
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Lantern 200M-citation analysis
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
AI search engines: 91% share of ai brand citations from external sources. Source: Lantern (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/external-ai-brand-citations-lantern
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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/external-ai-brand-citations-lantern" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>91%</strong> -- share of ai brand citations from external sources for AI search engines<br><small>Source: Lantern (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/external-ai-brand-citations-lantern" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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