With Location On, AI Cites the Sources That Know Places | Yext Research

The short version

Ask an AI about a brand with no sense of where the human is, and you are likely to see sources like Wikipedia. That is rarely the question a customer asks. Location is central to the context an answer is built on, and assistants keep it on by default, so a brand question is usually a place question. The 155.5 million citations in this study were earned on location-grounded questions, the kind customers actually ask. Four in five pointed to a website or a listing, the two things a brand can keep current, and the mix likely shifts again at every level of geography, from national to DMA to state to city to neighborhood to the single location.

What to do. Read your AI presence with location in the question, at every level you compete at, and keep your website pages, listings, and the small directories current, because the models read them and cite what they find.

How to read the zones of control

Each citation was classified by the type of source it points to. Websites are pages on the brand's own domain. Listings are public directories that carry structured business facts. Reviews and social covers platforms where customers write about the brand. News and other covers press, forums, and everything else. The study counts the first two as influenceable, since a brand writes its own pages and, when listings are managed, controls those too.

Full

Finding 01

The forgotten publishers top the third-party list

Set the brand-owned domains aside and rank where else the models point. The top spot belongs to MapQuest, with almost six million citations in one quarter, 5.8 for every one that Wikipedia earned. TripAdvisor sits second and climbing, and Yelp is third and new to the list, so the whole top ten is directories and review platforms with the internet's encyclopedia as the lone exception.

One reading is validation. Business facts used to live across a crowd of small publishers, back before search converged on one engine, and the AI models appear to have re-opened that market, cross-checking that a brand's details agree on the smaller directories as well as the big platforms and citing the places where the facts line up.

Most-cited third-party domains

Citations in Q1 2026, millions · movement vs the prior quarter

MapQuest has held the top spot across quarters, while TripAdvisor, Uber Eats, Booking, and Expedia moved up and Yelp, Wikipedia, and Grubhub entered the list this quarter. Healthgrades, the Better Business Bureau, and WebMD each slipped a rank or two and stayed on it.

Finding 02

Four in five citations sit in the influenceable zones

Across all four models, 80 percent of the citations pointed at a website or a listing, the two zones a brand can keep current, while the other fifth came from reviews, social, press, and forums, the zones it can only nudge.

Per model, the influenceable share runs 85 percent for OpenAI, 81 for Gemini, 80 for Perplexity, and 69 for Anthropic. That is a 16-point spread between the highest model and the lowest.

Citation sources by model, share of each model's citations

Each bar splits one model's citations by source type, and the two left segments together are the influenceable share. 80% of the quarter's AI citations pointed to a source a brand can influence, holding near four in five even as citation volume nearly tripled.

Finding 03

A reviews-heavy model moved the average

A quarter earlier the influenceable share read higher, and one number explains the slide to 80. Anthropic pulls seven and a half times the share of its citations from reviews and social that OpenAI does, and the panel scanned 15 times more Anthropic answers than the quarter before, so a reviews-heavy model arrived at scale and the blended average moved with it.

We are not claiming the models became harder to influence, since the three models tracked from the start held their shapes and only the mix of models being measured changed.

7.5×

Anthropic draws seven and a half times the share of its citations from reviews and social that OpenAI does, so which model answers now shapes how influenceable the answer is.

Finding 04

AI citations are compounding

The database behind this study grew fast, so raw totals flatter the trend. The honest read holds the panel to the same 770 brands tracked since the third quarter of 2025, and that cohort's citations nearly tripled in three quarters.

The sharper number is per scan. Each time a single AI answer was scanned, the cohort's brands were cited 28 percent more often than the quarter before. The growth is in the answers themselves, on top of any growth in scanning.

Citations in the study by model, by quarter

These bars are the whole study, so they grow with the scanning and the brand panel as well as with the citing. The like-for-like reads are the cohort numbers, a near tripling in citations and 28 percent growth per scan.

Why it looks this way

Why the models cite these sources

These are hypotheses rather than settled conclusions, and each one can be checked against what the models cite for your own brand.

What you can do

Three practical steps

01

Keep the influenceable zones current

Websites and listings drew four of every five citations measured, so accurate hours, services, and details on both is the largest surface you can work on directly.

02

Update the smaller directories too

MapQuest, TripAdvisor, and Yelp top the third-party list. Consistent facts across the smaller publishers is what the models appear to cross-check before they cite.

03

Build a review presence for the reviews-heavy models

One model already draws a fifth of its citations from reviews and social. Fresh reviews, responses, and active profiles reach the zone you only partly control.