Owned versus third-party citation share | Trakkr Research
Study: AI Crawls Your Product Pages. It Cites Your Blog. Title: Owned versus third-party citation share.
Methodology: Built from 337,362 citations and 11,406,191 crawler visits across 882 brands, with page-type classification and crawl-to-citation matching.
Summary
The citation layer is overwhelmingly third-party, which means selection depends on both owned pages and outside corroboration. This benchmark pattern indicates that AI systems heavily favor external validation over direct brand sources.
Benchmark rows
| Metric | Value | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Owned citation share | 1.84% | Only a small slice of citations point to owned domains. |
| Third-party citation share | 98.16% | Most citations point to third-party sources. |
Ranked view
| Item | Value | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Third-party pages | 98.16% | The overwhelming majority of citations point outside the brand’s own site. |
| Owned pages | 1.84% | Owned-site citations are a tiny share of the full citation graph. |
Related pages
Continue through the same study cluster.
- do blog posts outperform product pages for ai citations - Related answer page
- what is citation efficiency and why does it matter - Related answer page
- blog pages run at one point four times citation efficiency - Related fact page
Data & Sources
- AI Crawls Your Product Pages. It Cites Your Blog. - Flagship study behind this page
- Page JSON - Machine-readable companion file