Who do AI engines actually cite when Australians ask about AEO?
We asked an AI answer engine 29 questions an Australian business owner might ask about getting into AI answers, and recorded every source it cited. 587 citations,343 different domains. This is the whole thing, including our own score.
The short answer
Nobody owns this answer in Australia yet. The five most-cited domains hold 10.2% of all citations between them, and 69% of cited domains appeared exactly once. For the questions a buyer asks when they are ready to hire, the engine quotes a mix of "best agencies in Australia" roundups and agencies' own service pages (28% of hiring citations read as a list this month), and the names change a lot from month to month.
- 343 domains were cited across 29 questions; the top five hold 10.2%.
- 238 of those domains (69%) were cited once and never again.
- In the ten hiring questions, the most-cited single page was a third-party roundup, cited in 3 of them.
- aeoservices.com.au was cited 0 times by either engine. The site launched on 19 September 2026, the day of the first run. Next measurement: November.
Month on month
Same engine, same 29 questions, every edition, so the headline numbers only ever compare like with like.
| Edition | Engine | Citations | Domains | Top-5 share | Cited once | aeoservices.com.au |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | Perplexity Sonar | 580 | 382 | 8.1% | 77% | 0 |
| October 2026 | Perplexity Sonar | 587 | 343 | 10.2% | 69% | 0 |
Joined the 15 most-cited domains since September 2026: semrush.com, openai.com, linkedin.com, keyword.com, ismybrandinai.com, airops.com, intelligentresourcing.co, marketing-interactive.com, aeobility.com.au, seo.com. Dropped out: searchenginejournal.com, analyticsinsight.net, orkkid.com, bestgeoagencyaustralia.com.au, leadsnow.ai, beamtrace.com, trysight.ai, wellows.com, bushletter.com, uprisedigital.com.au.
Hiring questions, new in the top ten: prosperitymedia.com.au, clearwateragency.com.au, intesols.com.au, roi.com.au, magnetoitsolutions.com, titanblue.com.au, intelligentresourcing.co. Dropped out: leadsnow.ai, thatware.co, bestgeoagencyaustralia.com.au, bushletter.com, orkkid.com, aipivot.com.au, digitalnomadshq.com.au. Held on: omnieclipse.ai, agencies.semrush.com, uprisedigital.com.au.
October 2026 update
17 October 2026. The second run, on the same engine and the same 29 questions, looks like a different market. Of the 382 domains cited in September, only 151 were cited again, and 192 appeared for the first time. Ten of the 15 most-cited domains changed. In the hiring questions, leadsnow.ai went from 5 of 10 answers to none, and the two exact-match "best agency Australia" domains, cited in 3 and 2 hiring answers in September, were not cited at all. Semrush's agency directory held at 4 of 10. The top five domains hold 10.2% of citations, up from 8.1%, so nobody owns this answer yet. We also added a second engine for the ten hiring questions (below): it quoted agencies' own service pages almost exclusively. aeoservices.com.au was cited by neither engine. Two runs are two samples, not a trend; November will show which of these moves were noise.
Hiring questions: who gets the enquiry
These 10 questions are the ones that matter commercially. Someone asking them is a qualified buyer, and whichever sources the engine quotes are the ones that get the lead. Someone asking these is a qualified buyer. Whoever is cited here gets the enquiry.
| Domain | Cited in | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| omnieclipse.ai | 4 of 10 questions | 4 |
| agencies.semrush.com | 4 of 10 questions | 12 |
| prosperitymedia.com.au | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| clearwateragency.com.au | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| intesols.com.au | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| uprisedigital.com.au | 3 of 10 questions | 4 |
| roi.com.au | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| magnetoitsolutions.com | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| titanblue.com.au | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| intelligentresourcing.co | 3 of 10 questions | 5 |
The individual pages cited most often for hiring questions
| Page | Domain | Cited |
|---|---|---|
| omnieclipse.ai › blog › best-aeo-agencies-australia-2026Best AEO Agencies in Australia for 2026 | Omni Eclipse | omnieclipse.ai | 3× |
| Generative AI SEO Services | LocaliQ Australia | localiq.com | 3× |
| 6 Best AEO Agencies in Australia for 2026 | talonsmarketing.com.au | 2× |
| Best AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) Agencies 2026 | digitalnomadshq.com.au | 2× |
| Answer Engine Optimisation - AEO Agency in Melbourne | intesols.com.au | 2× |
3 of these 5 pages are roundups or directories rather than an agency's own site, and 28% of all 196 hiring citations read as a list. That matches the strongest finding in the published research, that earned third-party coverage is cited far more heavily than brand-owned content: being on the lists the engine reads is a large part of the work. It is not all of it. The second engine below quotes agencies' own service pages almost exclusively, so the page on your own site that answers the question still has to exist. This space is not empty, it is fragmented, and it moves.
The 10 hiring questions we asked
- best AEO agency in Australia
- who can help my business get cited by ChatGPT in Australia
- answer engine optimisation agency Australia
- generative engine optimisation agency Australia
- AI search optimisation agency Sydney
- AI SEO agency Melbourne
- how much does an AEO agency cost in Australia
- best AI visibility agency for Australian B2B SaaS
- who should I hire to get my brand into AI answers
- AEO consultant Brisbane
Second engine check: OpenAI GPT-6 Luna with OpenAI web search (ChatGPT-family)
The same 10 hiring questions, asked through the model's API on 17 October 2026. It is a proxy for ChatGPT, not ChatGPT itself, and it is reported here on its own: none of it is in the headline numbers. It cited 31 sources against Perplexity's 196. Only 1 of them read as a roundup or directory; the rest are almost all agencies' own service pages. 20 of its 25 domains end in .au (Perplexity: 57 of 119), and 9 of them also appear in Perplexity's hiring answers.
| Domain | Cited in | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| clickedon.co | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| optimising.com.au | 3 of 10 questions | 3 |
| paperstack.com.au | 2 of 10 questions | 2 |
| geopt.com.au | 2 of 10 questions | 2 |
| sonargroup.com.au | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
| gudu.com.au | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
| searchscope.com.au | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
| answerenginesoptimization.ai | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
| onetoo.com.au | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
| redherring.au | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
| rocketagency.com.au | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
| firewiredigital.com.au | 1 of 10 questions | 1 |
Diagnosing the problem questions
The business owner has noticed something is wrong and is looking for an explanation. 8 questions, 165 citations.
| Domain | Cited in | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| linkedin.com | 3 of 8 | 3 |
| searchengineland.com | 3 of 8 | 4 |
| blog.hubspot.com | 3 of 8 | 3 |
| semrush.com | 3 of 8 | 3 |
| menafn.com | 2 of 8 | 2 |
| pepper.inc | 2 of 8 | 2 |
| brandarmor.ai | 2 of 8 | 2 |
| openai.com | 2 of 8 | 9 |
| indexly.ai | 2 of 8 | 2 |
| pixis.ai | 2 of 8 | 2 |
The 8 questions in this group
- why is my competitor showing up in ChatGPT but not my brand
- my website traffic dropped because of AI overviews what do I do
- how do I find out if ChatGPT recommends my business
- does my business need answer engine optimisation
- is AEO worth paying for
- how do AI models decide which brands to recommend
- we are invisible in AI search how do we fix it
- AEO vs SEO which should an Australian business invest in
How-to questions
Practitioner questions. Cited sources here shape what people believe works. 6 questions, 126 citations.
| Domain | Cited in | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| searchengineland.com | 5 of 6 | 7 |
| semrush.com | 4 of 6 | 6 |
| ahrefs.com | 3 of 6 | 5 |
| airops.com | 3 of 6 | 3 |
| blog.hubspot.com | 3 of 6 | 4 |
| searchable.com | 3 of 6 | 3 |
| business.adobe.com | 3 of 6 | 3 |
| useomnia.com | 2 of 6 | 2 |
| brightedge.com | 2 of 6 | 2 |
| ismybrandinai.com | 2 of 6 | 2 |
The 6 questions in this group
- how to get your brand cited by ChatGPT
- how to rank in Google AI overviews 2026
- does schema markup help AI citations
- how to improve brand visibility in Perplexity
- what actually drives AI citations for a business
- how to measure if ChatGPT mentions your brand
Tools questions
Comparison and shopping queries for monitoring software. 5 questions, 100 citations.
| Domain | Cited in | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| semrush.com | 3 of 5 | 6 |
| ismybrandinai.com | 3 of 5 | 4 |
| frase.io | 2 of 5 | 2 |
| brand24.com | 2 of 5 | 3 |
| airops.com | 2 of 5 | 3 |
| nicklafferty.com | 2 of 5 | 2 |
| keyword.com | 2 of 5 | 2 |
| ahrefs.com | 2 of 5 | 3 |
| honeyb.ai | 2 of 5 | 2 |
| gracker.ai | 2 of 5 | 2 |
The 5 questions in this group
- best AI visibility tracking tools 2026
- Profound vs Peec AI vs Scrunch
- cheapest way to track brand mentions in ChatGPT
- AI citation monitoring tool for agencies
- free tool to check if ChatGPT mentions my brand
Most-cited domains across all 29 questions
| Domain | Questions it appeared in | Total citations |
|---|---|---|
| semrush.com | 10 of 29 | 15 |
| openai.com | 5 of 29 | 12 |
| agencies.semrush.com | 4 of 29 | 12 |
| searchengineland.com | 8 of 29 | 11 |
| linkedin.com | 7 of 29 | 10 |
| ahrefs.com | 6 of 29 | 9 |
| blog.hubspot.com | 8 of 29 | 9 |
| keyword.com | 5 of 29 | 6 |
| ismybrandinai.com | 5 of 29 | 6 |
| airops.com | 5 of 29 | 6 |
| omnieclipse.ai | 5 of 29 | 5 |
| intelligentresourcing.co | 3 of 29 | 5 |
| marketing-interactive.com | 3 of 29 | 5 |
| aeobility.com.au | 2 of 29 | 5 |
| seo.com | 4 of 29 | 5 |
Trade press (Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, HubSpot) is cited in every group except hiring. Australian-specific sources only dominate the hiring questions, which is exactly where an Australian business wants to be quoted.
What this means if you are buying
- Ask any agency for their own number. If they sell AI visibility they should be able to show their citation share for the questions their own buyers ask. Ours is on this page and it is zero.
- Judge the plan by which sources it targets. The cited pages above are the map. A proposal built on schema markup and a dashboard, with no plan for the roundups, directories and trade press the engines quote, is not aimed at the thing that moves.
- Expect a monthly measurement against a fixed prompt set, not a proprietary score. The comparison is the product.
Method
- Engine: Perplexity Sonar, queried through its API (via OpenRouter) on 17 October 2026, the same engine as every edition since September 2026. One run a month. That is a limitation, stated plainly.
- Second engine (spot check): OpenAI GPT-6 Luna with OpenAI web search (ChatGPT-family), the ten hiring questions only, through its API (via OpenRouter) on the same day. Shown in its own table and never mixed into the headline numbers.
- Prompt set: 29 questions in four groups (hiring, diagnosing a problem, how-to, tools), written the way an Australian business owner would ask them. The full list is on this page and does not change between runs.
- What we recorded: every URL the engine cited in its answer, in order, with its domain and title. Nothing was filtered or de-duplicated except at the point of counting.
- Counting: "cited in N questions" counts a domain once per question no matter how many of its pages were cited. "Citations" counts every cited URL.
- Roundup or own page: a cited page counts as a roundup or directory if its title or URL contains "best", "top" plus a number, "ranking", "agencies", "directory" or "compared". Crude, but fixed, so it compares month to month.
- Caveat: AI answers are non-deterministic. A single run is a sample. The value is in the month-on-month comparison, which is why the prompt set is fixed.
- Data: download this month's raw rows as CSV (618 rows, both engines). Earlier editions are linked in the month-on-month table. Licensed CC BY 4.0: use it, cite this page. Every edition is also on GitHub.
Common questions
Why publish data that shows your own site with zero citations?
Because that is the number, and the whole premise of this practice is that citation share is measurable. The site launched on 19 September 2026, the day of the first run. We publish the same measurement every month, and if the number does not move we say so.
Is one engine on one day enough to draw conclusions from?
No, and we do not. It is enough to show the shape of the category: who is cited for buyer questions, how concentrated the answers are, and which surfaces matter. The monthly comparison is where the signal is. AI answers are non-deterministic, so any single run is a sample, not a verdict.
Can I use this data?
Yes. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. Cite this page as the source and link to it. The raw rows are downloadable as CSV below.
Will you run this for my category?
Yes. The same method, with a prompt set built from how your buyers actually ask. That is the baseline step of every engagement and the free snapshot on the home page is a one-question version of it.
Want this run for your category?
Same method, your buyers' questions. Start with the free one-question snapshot.
Example: a sample snapshot for Brisbane plumbers and one for Brisbane electricians, ten questions, two engines, every name from the stored answers.
Find out where you stand in AI answers
Five minutes. It builds the prompts a buyer would type, you paste the answers back, and it scores mention and citation separately. Runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent to us.
Start the free checkSend one buyer question for a free snapshot by email, or enquire about the $2,500 + GST audit or a monthly programme. Written reply within two business days; no call required.
Send an enquiryPrices are published: audit $2,500 + GST fixed, programme $3,500–$7,500 a month + GST. So is our own score: the AI Citation Index for Australia shows who AI engines cite for AEO questions, and the measured agency ranking puts us where the data does — at zero.