u/Citelens-ai

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

been measuring AI answer citations for a while now and two things genuinely surprised me, figured this sub would have opinions.

first one: i took the same commercial query and asked google's AI three times in a row. the cited sources are only fully stable about 81% of the time. roughly 3 sources shift on every single repeat. so the thing we're trying to "rank" in isn't even showing the same answer twice. feels like building SEO on sand.

second, and this is the one that actually changed how i think: i checked the domains AI overviews cite against google's own organic top 10 for the same query. 60% of the cited domains aren't in the top 10 at all. you can be #1 on google and just not exist inside the AI answer, because it's pulling from youtube (showed up in 74% of answers i looked at) and forums way more than polished landing pages.

and the part nobody talks about, if you do anything multilingual: ran the same questions in two languages and the cited sources overlapped only 22%. so your english AI visibility tells you basically nothing about your visibility in another language. it's a completely separate game per language.

i publish the raw methodology on our research page if anyone wants to pick it apart, not gonna pitch anything here, genuinely think most of this is unmeasured right now.

how are you all handling the instability? are you even treating AI citations as a separate channel yet or just letting it ride as a byproduct of normal SEO?