Generic studies like the one from Semrush (
https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-mode-comparison-study/) offer an overview of the sources AI-powered search engines, such as Perplexity, use.
While Semrush analyzed a large number of sources (150,000), their findings are broad and not always useful for specific topics because sources can vary greatly between segments. For example, Semrush found Reddit and Wikipedia to be frequently cited, but in our research, neither of these sources appeared. Additionally, Semrush did not disclose the prompts they used, whereas our study uses prompts based on G2’s "Most Popular Software Categories."
To provide more targeted insights, we analyzed around 2,000 sources in response to prompts focused specifically on software categories from G2, with a focus on Perplexity as the AI search engine.
Some takeaway:
* "Corporate" websites dominate citations, accounting for 76.07% of all sources.
* Most frequently cited domains in the "Corporate" category include established, "older" domains like ions.de and zendesk.de, as well as less well-known sites such as botpress.com.
* Comparison pages like www.crmsystem.de do not dominate the citations, even though they might be expected to rank higher due to their likely greater neutrality compared to corporate sources.
We will update the report in the next few week to analyze around 200 prompts (10 software categories from G2 each 20 prompts) which will lead to around 4000 urls.
