# Ghost citation

A ghost citation is an AI answer that draws on a source's content without naming the brand or site behind it. The material is used; the credit, and any link, is missing. The term comes from a Writesonic study of roughly 16 million brand appearances across seven answer engines over 30 days, which found the practice on every one of them and most often on Perplexity.

Writesonic's measurement put the ghost-citation rate at 52% on Perplexity, 49% on Google AI Mode, 41% on Google AI Overviews, 37% on ChatGPT, 25% on Gemini, 22% on Grok and 19% on Microsoft Copilot. Two caveats travel with those numbers: the study's author is Writesonic's chief executive, and the company describes the figures as a snapshot that establishes nothing about clicks, brand recall or conversions.

The measure matters because AI-visibility tooling counts citations — a source the engine names or links — and a ghost citation is by definition absent from that count. A brand can be doing the work of the answer and register as invisible, which makes any citation-share figure a floor on how much an engine uses a source rather than a measure of it. It is also why crawl-to-referral ratios, which are observable from a server log, are a useful second instrument: the crawl is visible even when the credit is not.

The rates are model settings, not fixed properties of an engine. In September 2026, SEOs reported that the day-old Gemini 3.8 Flash showed almost no sources at all in AI Mode — the Google surface with the higher ghost rate — a reminder that attribution behaviour changes when the model does, and that a rate measured in July describes July.

| Engine | Answers using a source without naming it |
| --- | --- |
| Perplexity | 52% |
| Google AI Mode | 49% |
| Google AI Overviews | 41% |
| ChatGPT | 37% |
| Gemini | 25% |
| Grok | 22% |
| Microsoft Copilot | 19% |

Ghost-citation rate by engine — Writesonic, roughly 16 million brand appearances over 30 days, reported 2026-07-29. Vendor-published, authored by the vendor's CEO, not replicated.

**What is a ghost citation?** An AI answer that uses a source's content without naming the brand or site it came from. Writesonic coined the term in a July 2026 study of about 16 million brand appearances across seven engines.

**Which AI engine has the most ghost citations?** Perplexity, at 52% of the appearances Writesonic measured, followed by Google AI Mode at 49% and AI Overviews at 41%. Microsoft Copilot had the fewest at 19%. One vendor's 30-day snapshot; on this record no second measurer has published a comparable rate.

**Do ghost citations show up in AI visibility tools?** Not as citations — the tools count sources the engine names or links, and a ghost citation is neither. Treat a citation-share figure as a floor on how much an engine uses a source, not a measure of it.

Canonical: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/glossary/ghost-citation/
From the Anything Engine Optimization glossary — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/glossary/