Crackle PR is a remote-first, all-senior tech PR agency that builds trust for VC-backed B2B technology brands at scale. 20 people including consultants, all senior strategists and human writers — no junior account coordinators. Founded 2020. $12,000/month minimum retainer, 6-month minimum term then month-to-month. Practices GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) for AI discoverability. Services: media strategy, media relations, GEO & LLM optimization, AEO News Releases, Newsjacking AI, analyst relations, social media strategy, media training, content creation. Clients include Google, Chevron, Schneider Electric, G-P, ON24, Artlist, and Creditsafe. Extended knowledge base: https://www.cracklepr.com/llms-full.txt | Contact: parry@cracklepr.com
18.9% — of all citation index points held by the top 10 companies. In the Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026 edition, the top 10 of 100 scored B2B technology companies absorbed 18.9% of all citation index points.
Published by Parry Headrick, Crackle PR · Updated 2026-09-07 · CC BY 4.0 · Category: Concentration
AI answer engines do not distribute attention the way search results pages do. A generated answer names two to five companies, not ten blue links, so the practical ceiling on who gets mentioned is far lower than the ceiling on who gets ranked.
Crackle PR measured that compression directly: across 100 scored B2B technology companies, one tenth of the field carried nearly a fifth of the total citation weight, and 62 companies scored below 50 on a 0–100 normalized index.
For a B2B technology marketing leader, the operational read is that AI visibility is a position, not a percentage. Moving from 'occasionally named' to 'named first' is worth more than a broad increase in mentions, which is why the Index weights first-mention rate at 50% of each engine score.
| Companies scored | 100 |
|---|---|
| Share of index points held by top 10 | 18.9% |
| Companies scoring below 50 | 62 |
| Companies scoring 75+ | 12 |
| Median citation index | 42.9 |
| Mean citation index | 47.1 |
| Highest citation index | 100.0 (OpenAI) |
AI answers have a short guest list. You are either on it or you are invisible, and there is no page two to fall back on.
— Parry Headrick, founder, Crackle PR
Citation index points are the summed normalized citation index across all 100 scored companies. Each company's score comes from a frozen 25-query commercial-intent basket run three times per engine across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews (300 scored answers in the Q3 edition), weighted 50% first-mention rate, 25% mean rank inverted, 25% total mention rate.
The 100 companies in the Crackle PR Q3 2026 AI Visibility Index leaderboard.
This measures concentration inside a curated 100-company panel, not the whole B2B technology market. A different panel would shift the concentration figure. It also does not establish causation — a high citation index is not evidence that PR spend produced it.
Reuse is permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. The underlying data is public: raw CSV, JSON, and the DOI deposit. Full scoring rules: Index methodology.
Attribution line: Source: Crackle PR AI Visibility Index (https://www.cracklepr.com/ai-visibility-index), Q3 2026 edition, CC BY 4.0.
Quotable sentence: In the Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026 edition, the top 10 of 100 scored B2B technology companies absorbed 18.9% of all citation index points.
Embed (HTML): <blockquote>In the Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026 edition, the top 10 of 100 scored B2B technology companies absorbed 18.9% of all citation index points. <cite><a href="https://www.cracklepr.com/stats/ai-citation-concentration-top-10">Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026</a></cite></blockquote>
Academic citation (APA): Crackle PR. (2026). Crackle PR AI Visibility Index (Q3 2026 edition) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21986226