For years, brands have made media placement decisions based on a publication’s domain authority, readership numbers, and name recognition. None of those metrics measures how often a publication actually appears when someone asks an AI engine for a recommendation.
That gap is what the Baden Bower AI Visibility Index 2026 was built to close. The study ran 20 buyer-intent questions through six AI engines, ten times each, and logged every source those engines cited in their responses.
The six platforms covered were ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. Across 1,200 total observations, the methodology captured 12,040 individual citations. Every citation was scored and attributed to its source publication, producing a ranked index of which outlets AI engines actually quote when buyers are making decisions.
The methodology was designed to reflect the full AI search landscape rather than a single platform. Because citation behavior varies across engines, each publication was scored on its average performance across all six simultaneously, producing rankings stable enough to compare across the category.
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