Finding
Across 45 AI answers to 15 UK marketing-buyer questions on 28 September 2026, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode cited 209 different domains, and 151 of them (72%) were cited exactly once.
Source: Whito, whito.co.uk/research/who-ai-cites-uk-marketing, September 2026. Free to quote with a link to this page.
Last Updated on September 29, 2026
Edition 1, collected 28 September 2026. What was counted: every source that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode attached to their answers when asked 15 questions a UK business asks before buying marketing. 45 answers, one per question per engine, all on one day from a UK connection. This page ranks the cited domains and will be re-collected monthly on the same protocol.
When a buyer asks an AI engine which agency to use or what SEO should cost, somebody’s page is underneath the answer. We measured whose.
How to read this page
- Asked. 15 fixed questions, from “best SEO agency UK” to “how much does content marketing cost UK”, asked verbatim with no follow-ups. Three engines on their consumer websites: ChatGPT with web search on, Perplexity’s default search, and Google AI Mode. One day, 28 September 2026. That makes 45 answers.
- Recorded. The sources each engine attached to its answer: ChatGPT’s citation chips, Perplexity’s numbered source list, AI Mode’s source cards. One count per domain per answer, however many times it was cited inside that answer.
- Not measured. Whether any cited page is accurate, whether any named agency is good, and whether citation produces clicks. Our citation-to-traffic study covers that last question separately.
The finding
Across 45 AI answers to 15 UK marketing-buyer questions on 28 September 2026, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode cited 209 different domains, and 151 of them (72%) were cited exactly once.
There is no shared shelf of trusted sources behind these answers. Only 35 of the 209 domains (17%) were cited by more than one engine, and just four were cited by all three: whito.co.uk, clutch.co, wise.com and levelupleads.co.uk. An engine picking sources for a marketing question is mostly picking pages the other two engines never touch.
The domains that dominate conventional marketing search were absent. Ahrefs, Moz, HubSpot, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, WordStream, Backlinko and Neil Patel received zero citations across all 45 answers. Semrush appeared twice, both times through its agency directory rather than its blog.
The leaderboard: most-cited domains, September 2026
Every domain cited in three or more of the 45 answers. “First” is the number of answers where the domain was the first source shown.
| Rank | Domain | Answers citing it (of 45) | ChatGPT | Perplexity | AI Mode | First |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | whito.co.uk * | 11 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 6 |
| 2 | clutch.co | 9 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 3 | reddit.com | 7 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 4 |
| 4= | expertmarket.com | 5 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| 4= | whitehat-seo.co.uk | 5 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 |
| 6= | redeagle.tech | 4 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| 6= | superhub.biz | 4 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 |
| 6= | wiseguyxl.uk | 4 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 |
| 6= | ysobelle-edwards.co.uk | 4 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| 10= | addpeople.co.uk | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| 10= | adzooma.com | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 10= | citehawk.com | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 10= | consultico.co.uk | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 10= | dpom.co.uk | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| 10= | expertsure.com | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 10= | levelupleads.co.uk | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 10= | propeller.co.uk | 3 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 10= | seo.com | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 2 |
| 10= | seoworks.co.uk | 3 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| 10= | wearetenet.com | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| 10= | wise.com | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 10= | youtube.com | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
Source: Whito, collected 28 September 2026, n=45 answers, 315 citation records. * Whito publishes in this space; see the disclosure section below, including a personalisation check that removes one of the 11.
What each engine’s shelf looks like
ChatGPT cites least. It attached an average of 2.5 cited domains per answer, against 9.4 for Perplexity and 9.1 for AI Mode. One of its 15 answers, on marketing budgets, carried no citations at all. Asked what a website costs, it cited four anonymous client sites hosted on Squarespace subdomains and a company called cheapwebdesign.co.uk. For “best agency” questions it leaned on awards bodies: UK Agency Awards and UK Search Awards pages backed its shortlists.
Perplexity spreads widest. It returned a full source list for all 15 questions, drawing heavily on comparison sites (expertmarket.com in five answers, expertsure.com in three) and on small UK agency blogs that publish prices.
Google AI Mode cites Google. On the three “best agency” questions, its source rail carried 43 Google Business Profile cards alongside 8 web sources. Reddit threads were its single most-used web source, cited in 7 of 15 answers and shown first in 4. Neither ChatGPT nor Perplexity cited Reddit once.
Who wins citations, and who is missing
Half the shelf is directly British: 103 of the 209 cited domains sit on .uk addresses. And the pages winning the cost questions publish concrete prices. On the Google Ads management question, all ten of AI Mode’s source cards were pricing guides with pound figures in the visible summary, from firms including Whitehat SEO, DPOM and Herd Marketing.
The marketing publishers with the largest search footprints earned nothing here. A UK business that reads Ahrefs, HubSpot or Search Engine Journal to learn marketing will not meet them in an AI answer about buying it. The shelf has been restocked with small agencies, comparison sites, awards bodies, Reddit and research publishers.
Whito in this data: disclosure
whito.co.uk was the most-cited domain in this collection, cited in 11 of 45 answers and shown first in 6. We publish UK marketing cost research, so we are a subject of this study as well as its author. Two things follow.
First, the conflict is stated here rather than footnoted: this leaderboard was collected, counted and published by Whito, and the raw per-answer file is available for checking.
Second, we tested our own result for personalisation. The ChatGPT and AI Mode runs used a signed-in account that visits whito.co.uk often, which could inflate our count. We re-ran all four AI Mode questions that cited Whito in a browser with no Google account and cookies rejected, on the same UK connection, the same day. Three of the four citations held, at lower positions: Google Ads management cost, email marketing platforms, and content marketing cost. One did not: the marketing budget question dropped Whito entirely, so we treat that citation as personalisation and exclude it. On the adjusted count, whito.co.uk was cited in 10 of 45 answers, still first on the board. The Perplexity run was anonymous throughout, and its 4 Whito citations need no adjustment. The ChatGPT figure of 3 could not be re-checked without an account and stays unverified; the same caution applies to every ChatGPT figure on this page.
Why it matters
UK buyers ask these exact questions, and the engines answer them with a settled voice and a short list of sources. Whoever those sources are becomes the reference point for what SEO should cost or which agency belongs on a shortlist. In September 2026 that position is held by a scattered set of pages, chosen differently by each engine: 151 of the 209 cited domains earned a single citation across all three.
For the publishers who built their names on search rankings, this channel is currently a separate contest with different winners. The zero-citation list above is the plainest evidence of that.
What to do
- If you sell marketing services: publish your prices with a date on them. The cited pages on this board are overwhelmingly cost guides with concrete pound figures. A rate card with a collection date beats a “contact us” page in this channel.
- If you are buying marketing: ask the engine for its sources and open them. In this collection 151 of 209 cited domains appeared once across three engines, and on several “best agency” answers an awards page or a Reddit thread was the entire cited evidence for the shortlist.
- If you want to know what engines can read about your business today: run the free Visibility Check. Seventeen checks, about twenty seconds, no email, no sales call.
The method
The 15 questions, asked verbatim: best SEO agency UK; how much does SEO cost UK; best digital marketing agency UK; how much does a website cost UK; best web design company UK; how much does Google Ads management cost UK; best PPC agency UK; how much should a small business spend on marketing UK; best social media marketing agency UK; how much does a marketing agency cost UK; best email marketing platform for UK small business; is SEO worth it for small businesses UK; how much do freelance marketers charge UK; best local SEO services UK; how much does content marketing cost UK.
Each question was asked once per engine in a fresh chat or search on 28 September 2026, from a UK connection. A citation is a source the engine itself attached to the answer: ChatGPT’s inline citation chips, Perplexity’s source list, AI Mode’s source cards after expanding “Show all”. Google Business Profile cards in AI Mode were counted separately and are not in the domain table. Domains were recorded at registrable level with www stripped; a domain cited several times in one answer counts once for that answer. The metric is citation share: the number of answers citing the domain, out of 45.
Limits
- One run per question per engine, on one day. AI answers vary between runs, so single-answer results are indicative; the monthly series is the point.
- The three engines present sources differently, so the per-engine counts measure slightly different things: chips for ChatGPT, a source list for Perplexity, source cards for AI Mode. Cross-engine totals inherit that difference.
- ChatGPT and AI Mode ran signed in; Perplexity ran anonymous. The AI Mode personalisation check above found one citation that did not survive sign-out. ChatGPT could not be re-checked anonymously.
- ChatGPT’s chip counts understate its full retrieval list, which it does not attach to the answer text.
- 15 questions cover marketing buying. They say nothing about other sectors.
- Citation is not endorsement and inclusion on this board says nothing about the quality of any listed company’s work.
The series
This is Edition 1 of the Whito AI Visibility Index citation leaderboard, part of our study series on how UK businesses are found. The question list and counting rules above are frozen; the collection re-runs monthly, and each edition publishes on this page’s model with its own date. Movements between editions become measurable from Edition 2, late October 2026.
The file behind the study
The dataset is a per-citation CSV: date, engine, question, domain, first-source flag, 315 rows, plus the anonymous re-check log. It is available on request through Whito Data; the counts on this page can be reproduced from it.
Corrections and right of reply
If something here is wrong, email hello@whito.co.uk. Corrections are made on this page, dated, with the original preserved. Our corrections policy is at https://whito.co.uk/corrections/. Nobody pays to appear in Whito research or to change a result: how we make money.
Cite this research
Whito Research (2026). Who AI cites for UK marketing advice: September 2026 leaderboard. Whito, 28 September 2026. https://whito.co.uk/research/who-ai-cites-uk-marketing/
Common questions
Which websites do AI engines cite most for UK marketing questions?
In Whito’s September 2026 collection of 45 answers, the most-cited domains were whito.co.uk (11 answers; 10 after a personalisation adjustment), clutch.co (9) and reddit.com (7, all on Google AI Mode). 151 of the 209 cited domains appeared in exactly one answer.
Do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode cite the same sources?
Mostly no. Only 35 of 209 cited domains (17%) appeared on more than one engine in September 2026, and four appeared on all three: whito.co.uk, clutch.co, wise.com and levelupleads.co.uk.
Are the big marketing publishers cited?
Ahrefs, Moz, HubSpot, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, WordStream, Backlinko and Neil Patel received zero citations across the 45 answers collected on 28 September 2026. Semrush appeared twice, via its agency directory.
How often is this leaderboard updated?
Monthly, on a frozen question list and counting protocol, so editions are comparable. Edition 2 collects in late October 2026.
- Do AI citations drive traffic? 17,400 citations, counted not modelled
- AI recommendations have outrun the UK public record: 12-city evidence
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