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citeOS / State of Crypto AI Citations
Free data report · 2026

The State of Crypto AI Citations

We pulled 39,948 citation events from 72 audited crypto brands across the 5 AI engines buyers actually use, then read the pages behind 1,357 of those citations by hand, to answer one question: what does it really take to get cited by AI? The findings break a lot of marketing intuition. Here is the data, free.

92%
Of all citations point at a domain the brand does not own. Your own pages are still the strongest single page type, they are just outnumbered.
33%
Of all citations came from third-party listicles, the single largest format. 48% among the most-cited pages we hand-read.
<1 in 100
Odds the same prompt returns the same brand list twice. You cannot hold a rank in AI.

n = 39,948 citation events · 72 audited crypto brands · 4,395 source domains · pages behind 1,357 citations read by hand

Where AI gets crypto answers, by source type Across 4,395 source domains and 39,948 citations from 72 brands: competitor brand sites 16.9 percent, user generated content social and video 8.7 percent, aggregators 5.9 percent, reference and directories 3.9 percent, everything else 64.6 percent. YouTube is the single largest source at 4.5 percent, cited for all 72 brands. WHERE AI GETS CRYPTO ANSWERS 4,395 SOURCE DOMAINS · 39,948 CITATIONS · 72 BRANDS COMPETITOR BRAND SITES16.9% UGC, SOCIAL AND VIDEO8.7% AGGREGATORS5.9% REFERENCE AND DIRECTORIES3.9% EVERYTHING ELSE64.6% 4.5% YOUTUBE IS THE SINGLE LARGEST SOURCE, CITED FOR ALL 72 BRANDS CITEOS.IO/METHODOLOGY
Floor estimates by source type across 4,395 source domains: competitor brand sites 16.9%, UGC, social and video 8.7%, aggregators 5.9%, reference and directories 3.9%. YouTube alone is 4.5% of all citations and appears for all 72 brands. Source: citeOS corpus, 39,948 citation events, April to August 2026.
What's inside / 01

Five engines. 20 buyer prompts. 39,948 citation events.

No vibes, no vanity metrics. Every claim in the report is tied to a number you can act on.

39,948
audited AI citation events behind the report
1.4×
the real Tier-1 cite premium over Tier-2: far smaller than the industry assumes
5
engines measured: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Mode

You will get the full cite-rate breakdown by outlet tier, the engine-disagreement data, the methodology behind every number, and a plain-English playbook for where to spend your next marketing dollar.

Why we built it / 02

Crypto buyers ask the AI before they ask Google.

And the horizontal AEO tools were built for SaaS: they don't rank crypto outlets, understand a token launch, or know a DeFi answer shouldn't cite a gaming blog. So we measured crypto on its own terms. This report is the first cut of that data, and the tool that measures your own version of it goes live this week.

Want your brand's version of this data, not the industry average?

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The report is the industry picture. The free scan is your picture: 5 engines, 20 buyer prompts, your real citation gap: in about a minute, no card.

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