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 |