1、What is AI Reading?December 2025Journalism and earned media continue to be important drivers:The majority of links cited by AI are non-paid coverage with about 25%of citations coming from journalistic sources.AI prefers sources published in the last year:More than half of all citations observed were
2、 published in the last 12 months.The highest citation rate occurs within seven days of publication.Press release citations have increased 5x since July:Press releases now account for 1%of citations,up from 0.2%in July.Outlet authority matters for GEO:AI models take into an account the authority of a
3、 source.This can be in a broad sense,like high domain authority sites like Reuters.Or in a more targeted way,like citing industry-specific sources for industry-specific queries.Models regularly adjust their citation practices:Between July and December 2025,all models tested made substantial changes
4、to their citation practices.For example,press release citations became more common,management consulting citations decreased,and Youtube became dominant in Gemini responses.Executive SummaryMethodology This study explores how modern generative AI systems cite sources in response to realistic user pr
5、ompts.Our objective was to quantify and characterize the nature of AI-generated citations across different use cases and vendor models.This includes their frequency,source types,and the prominence of earned and owned media.To accomplish this,we constructed a large,diverse prompt set and executed it
6、across several web-enabled language models,followed by systematic analysis of the responses and the cited links.The prompts span a variety of industries and subject matter.Sometimes prompts specifically mention companies by name,sometimes they do not.Gemini,Perplexity,Claude and ChatGPT were used to