Figure from the Q3 2026 edition · the current Index edition is Q4 2026 · see it here
18.9%
of all citation index points held by the top 10 companies
AI answer visibility is thin-headed: the top 10 companies hold 18.9% of citation index points
Published by Parry Headrick · Updated Sep 7, 2026 · CC BY 4.0
The finding, verbatim
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.
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.
Q3 2026 distribution
| 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.”
How it was measured
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.
Denominator
The 100 companies in the Crackle PR Q3 2026 AI Visibility Index leaderboard.
What this number does not prove
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.
Cite this statistic
Reuse is permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. The underlying data is public: raw CSV, JSON, and the DOI deposit.
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.21986226Full scoring rules, weights, and margin of error: Index methodology.
Go deeper
- →AI Visibility IndexThe full leaderboard, dataset, and quarterly editions.
- →Index methodologyQuery basket, scoring weights, and margin of error.
- →Publisher recusal policyWhy Crackle PR holds no rank in its own leaderboard.
- →What is GEO?Generative engine optimization, defined.
More statistics from this edition
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