Ghost citation

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.