Grok cites about four and a half sources per answer, and they are almost all roundups and articles: every one of its 10 most-cited target sites is a roundup, and community sites get 0.5% of the citations to its top 100 target sites. It also reads its own set of sites, sending 30.7% of the citations to its 100 most-cited target sites to sites no other engine cited, second only to ChatGPT.
This note looks at Grok alone; the cross-engine headline numbers are in what seven AI engines cite. Each number below says which of two lists it comes from:
- All hosts counts every cited site except cituna.com, including the domains of the competitors Cituna tracks and the engines' own properties.
- Target sites leaves out those two groups: what remains is publishers, directories, communities and the blogs of companies outside the tracked list.
How many sources Grok cites
Grok's 552 answers carried 2,481 third-party citations, or 4.5 per answer. The other six engines average 8.6, and only Gemini (3.5) cites fewer. xAI's developer documentation says its web search tool lets Grok "search the web in real-time and browse web pages", with citations available from the results.
Grok cited 125 different target sites, against an average of 210 for the other engines. Its top 100 reaches down to sites with one citation, so its total is known: target sites took 935 citations, and the other 1,546 (62.3%) went to tracked competitors' domains or the engines' own properties.
The sites Grok cites most
Counting all hosts, the top five were rankability.com (75 citations), menra.ai (67), cognizo.ai (59), xseek.io (54) and ayzeo.com (52). Four are tracked competitors' domains; menra.ai is a target site. Together they took 307 citations, 12.4% of the total, the lowest top-five share of the seven engines (the others average 18.3%).
| Site | Page kind | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| menra.ai | Roundup | 67 |
| seoturtle.com | Roundup | 46 |
| rankai.ai | Roundup | 41 |
| layer3labs.io | Roundup | 34 |
| shadow.inc | Roundup | 33 |
| lilbigthings.com | Roundup | 31 |
| theguidex.com | Roundup | 27 |
| pepper.inc | Roundup | 23 |
| hzsignal.com | Roundup | 22 |
| geo-search-console.com (tied) | Roundup | 21 |
| metehan.ai (tied) | Roundup | 21 |
| techradar.com (tied) | Roundup | 21 |
| writesonic.com (tied) | Roundup | 21 |
The top 10 places took 345 citations: 13.9% of Grok's third-party total, close to the 14.4% average elsewhere, and 37.9% of the citations to its top 100 target sites (the others average 43.7%).
| Engine | Share |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 53.4% |
| Grok | 30.7% |
| Perplexity | 18.2% |
| Claude | 17.5% |
| Gemini | 17.4% |
| Google AI Overviews | 4.1% |
| Google AI Mode | 3.9% |
Some of the sites only Grok cites rank high in its list. Three of its top 10, lilbigthings.com (31), theguidex.com (27) and pepper.inc (23), were cited by no other engine. In all, 42 of its top 100 target sites were cited by Grok alone.
What kinds of pages Grok reads
| Page kind | Sites | Citations | Share | Other six, average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roundups | 59 | 702 | 77.1% | 65.5% |
| Articles | 38 | 186 | 20.4% | 15.3% |
| Reference | 1 | 10 | 1.1% | 0.8% |
| Review sites | 1 | 7 | 0.8% | 1.5% |
| Community | 1 | 5 | 0.5% | 9.8% |
| Video | 0 | 0 | 0.0% | 6.9% |
Roundups and articles together take 97.6% of Grok's top-100 citations. Grok has the second-highest roundup share after ChatGPT and the second-highest article share after Claude. Its only community site is reddit.com, with five citations; it cited no YouTube or LinkedIn pages. x.com appears in none of the target lists, and because those lists leave out the engines' own properties, these files cannot show how often Grok cited X. Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn in AI answers compares the community sites across engines.
Which questions Grok answers from which sites
Each site in our data lists up to three of the tracked questions it was cited for. Grok's top 100 target sites carry 140 such listings:
- The six "alternative to X" questions: 24 listings, 22 of them roundups.
- Tool-choice questions (best tracker, price, Search Console, API, audits): 72 listings, 54 roundups and 16 articles.
- How-to and definition questions: 44 listings, 26 articles and 17 roundups.
How-to questions make up 31.4% of Grok's listings, the highest share of the seven engines (the others range from 3.9% to 27.6%), and articles answer most of them. "How to get cited by ChatGPT" draws 16 sites, 13 of them articles, led by contently.com (18), marketerhire.com (18) and presspilot.io (16). "How do AI engines decide which brands to cite" draws six sites, all articles.
Does Grok misread the question?
Not in this data: the sampled pages of Grok's 100 most-cited target sites show no misreads. Where other engines turned "how to get cited by ChatGPT" into how to cite ChatGPT, Grok's only sampled page on citing ChatGPT covers both readings: imarkinfotech.com (4) was cited for a page on how to cite ChatGPT and how to get cited by it. Perplexity, Gemini and Claude each sent between 5.6% and 9.7% of their top-100 citations to pages on the wrong subject.
How Grok compares with the other six engines
| Measure | Grok | Other six, average |
|---|---|---|
| Third-party citations per answer | 4.5 | 8.6 |
| Target sites cited | 125 | 210 |
| Top 5 of all hosts, share of third-party citations | 12.4% | 18.3% |
| Top 10 target sites, share of third-party citations | 13.9% | 14.4% |
| Roundups, share of top-100 target citations | 77.1% | 65.5% |
| Articles, share of top-100 target citations | 20.4% | 15.3% |
| Community and video, share of top-100 target citations | 0.5% | 16.8% |
| Top-100 target citations to sites no other engine cited | 30.7% | 19.1% |
| Top-100 target citations to misread pages | 0.0% | 4.2% |
For a brand in this category, two things follow. Almost a third of Grok's top-100 citations go to sites the other engines do not cite, so a presence that works elsewhere may not reach Grok; check its list on its own (how to get cited by Grok). And for how-to questions it leans on single articles rather than lists or threads (how to write content AI engines cite).
Method and limits
What was counted. A citation is one source URL shown in one answer, grouped by site. Third-party figures leave out cituna.com. The target list also leaves out the tracked competitors' own domains and the engines' own properties. Grok's file ranks its 100 most-cited target sites; its cutoff is one citation, so ties there were broken arbitrarily, and the 25 target sites outside it had one citation each. "Cited by no other engine" means no citation from any of the other six in the window. Page kinds are the labels in Cituna's data. Each site lists up to three questions and up to three sample page addresses, and misreads were judged from those addresses.
The window. 33 scans in the 30 days to 22 September 2026, which produced 552 Grok answers. "Other six, average" is the plain average of the six other engines' figures.
The questions. They are about one software category, AI visibility tools, and they are the questions Cituna tracks for itself, listed in the cross-engine note.
What the numbers can and cannot show. They show which sites Grok cited for these questions in this window. They cannot show why it chose them, how it behaves in other categories or markets, or what any one user sees, because answers vary by account, location and time. Site-level counts cannot separate one page from another on the same site. The full method is on the methodology page.