Perplexity built its whole reputation on citing its sources, so the sites it leans on tell you a lot about how it answers.
Unlike a general chatbot, Perplexity is an answer engine first: it was designed to respond to questions with linked references up front. That model has found a real audience, with the company reporting hundreds of millions of queries a month and tens of millions of active users worldwide. It’s also unusually candid about sourcing, which makes its citation mix especially revealing.
To map it, we tracked every domain Perplexity cited across a broad set of US queries, then ranked them by mention share — each domain’s slice of all the citations the top sources collectively earn. The leader is www.youtube.com, capturing 32.4% of citations — the most concentrated top source of any assistant we looked at.
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Mention share = a domain’s citations as a percentage of the summed citations of the top sources. Data via Ahrefs Brand Radar · United States, all topics · June 2026.
| # | Website | Mention share | vs last month | Pages cited | DR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 32.4% | – | 1,797,279 | 99 | |
| 2 | 16.6% | – | 797,846 | 95 | |
| 3 | 8.2% | – | 129,855 | 97 | |
| 4 | 5.1% | – | 168,205 | 92 | |
| 5 | 2.9% | – | 100,372 | 72 | |
| 6 | 1.8% | – | 105,136 | 94 | |
| 7 | 1.6% | – | 64,426 | 91 | |
| 8 | 1.4% | ▲ 3 | 50,254 | 99 | |
| 9 | 1.3% | – | 44,031 | 86 | |
| 10 | 1.3% | ▼ 2 | 51,797 | 92 | |
| 11 | 1.3% | ▼ 1 | 10,441 | 92 | |
| 12 | 1.2% | ▲ 2 | 55,385 | 100 | |
| 13 | 1.1% | – | 30,180 | 89 | |
| 14 | 1.0% | ▲ 2 | 15,724 | 92 | |
| 15 | 0.9% | ▲ 2 | 37,931 | 89 | |
| 16 | 0.9% | ▼ 4 | 32,798 | 94 | |
| 17 | 0.8% | ▲ 4 | 21,912 | 92 | |
| 18 | 0.8% | ▲ 7 | 7,273 | 90 | |
| 19 | 0.8% | – | 9,108 | 86 | |
| 20 | 0.8% | ▼ 5 | 10,380 | 94 | |
| 21 | 0.8% | ▼ 1 | 8,988 | 90 | |
| 22 | 0.8% | ▲ 2 | 11,265 | 90 | |
| 23 | 0.8% | – | 20,732 | 94 | |
| 24 | 0.8% | ▲ 3 | 10,587 | 91 | |
| 25 | 0.7% | ▲ 12 | 17,072 | 85 | |
| 26 | 0.7% | ▼ 4 | 8,003 | 92 | |
| 27 | 0.7% | ▼ 9 | 27,099 | 86 | |
| 28 | 0.7% | ▼ 2 | 34,390 | 94 | |
| 29 | 0.7% | ▼ 1 | 9,901 | 91 | |
| 30 | 0.6% | – | 18,315 | 91 | |
| 31 | 0.6% | ▲ 4 | 6,120 | 91 | |
| 32 | 0.6% | – | 18,238 | 78 | |
| 33 | 0.6% | ▲ 1 | 18,592 | 92 | |
| 34 | 0.6% | ▼ 1 | 12,104 | 92 | |
| 35 | 0.6% | ▼ 6 | 19,114 | 75 | |
| 36 | 0.6% | ▲ 5 | 8,595 | 87 | |
| 37 | 0.6% | ▼ 1 | 6,572 | 90 | |
| 38 | 0.6% | ▼ 7 | 22,451 | 93 | |
| 39 | 0.5% | ▲ 3 | 4,167 | 90 | |
| 40 | 0.5% | ▼ 1 | 16,136 | 82 | |
| 41 | 0.5% | NEW | 14,897 | 73 | |
| 42 | 0.5% | ▲ 3 | 5,098 | 91 | |
| 43 | 0.5% | ▲ 5 | 16,483 | 80 | |
| 44 | 0.5% | NEW | 17,052 | 91 | |
| 45 | 0.5% | NEW | 6,022 | 89 | |
| 46 | 0.5% | NEW | 17,010 | 87 | |
| 47 | 0.5% | ▲ 3 | 9,317 | 82 | |
| 48 | 0.5% | NEW | 14,343 | 91 | |
| 49 | 0.5% | – | 15,681 | 88 | |
| 50 | 0.5% | ▼ 7 | 2,981 | 94 |
The numbers come from Ahrefs’ Brand Radar, which tracks the responses AI platforms give to a large, search-backed set of real user queries. For this article, we looked at every domain Perplexity cited across over 3.1 million US queries spanning all topics, then counted how often each domain appeared as a source.
For each website we report:
- Mention share — a domain’s citations as a percentage of the summed citations of the top 50 most-cited sources. It shows how much of Perplexity’s “source attention” each website captures.
- vs last month — how the domain’s rank has moved since the previous monthly snapshot (▲ climbed, ▼ fell, or NEW if it wasn’t in last month’s top 50).
- Pages cited — the number of distinct pages on the domain that Perplexity cited, a measure of how broadly the site is referenced rather than how often.
- DR (Domain Rating) — Ahrefs’ 0–100 measure of a website’s backlink-profile strength, included for context on each source’s overall authority.
This article is generated and automatically kept up to date every month by Agent A, our AI agent. Each month it pulls the latest Brand Radar data, recalculates mention share and rank movement, and refreshes the chart and table above — so the figures always reflect the most recent snapshot.
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