Muck Rack Finds Journalism Share of AI Citations Fell to 22%

Oct 29, 2026
Muck Rack found that earned and third party sources produced more than 84% of citations in generative AI responses, while journalism's share declined from 27% in May to 22% in September.

Journalism's share of citations in generative AI answers fell from 27% in May to 22% in September, Muck Rack said in its latest What Is AI Reading? report. Earned and third party sources still produced more than 84% of citations, and paid or advertorial content stayed at 0.3%.

Most of the lost share moved to other third party sources. Government and NGO sources rose from 8.6% to 9.6%, aggregators and encyclopedic sources increased from 17.4% to 18.3%, and academic research moved from 4% to 4.4%.

ChatGPT showed the largest decline in journalism citations, from 28.1% in January to 22% in September. Claude's share ranged from about 28% to 24%, while Gemini's declined from 27.6% to 23.6%.

The findings cover more than 40 million AI responses and 207 million citations collected during 2026. They also include 1,020 prompts tested in September across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

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