What actually wins in Perplexity: a study of 1,195 citations

The prevailing advice about ranking in AI search goes something like this: earn coverage from trusted publishers, get mentioned in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, build a PR pipeline, and eventually the language models will cite you. The often-quoted figure is that 85 to 90 percent of AI citations come from “earned media.”

We pulled 1,195 Perplexity citations across six industries to see whether that story holds. It doesn’t — or at least, it doesn’t hold evenly. In most verticals, the single largest source of Perplexity citations is content the cited brand publishes on its own domain. Traditional earned media plays a much smaller role than the advice suggests, and its share varies enormously by industry. In some verticals it matters a lot. In others it’s almost invisible.

More practically: what actually moves the needle is different in every industry. A playbook that works for commercial insurance will get you nowhere in industrial staffing. A strategy tuned for home services won’t help a SaaS company. This article walks through what we found in each of the six verticals — and what an SMB or agency should actually do about it.

The headline finding

Across all 1,195 citations in the study, self-published content — blog posts, service pages, and listicles on the brand’s own domain — accounts for roughly 55 percent of citations. Add in content the brand publishes on third-party platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube, and the “I control this” bucket climbs to about 64 percent.

Traditional earned media — trade press, research firms, government sources, encyclopedias — makes up about 12 percent of citations. Affiliate listicles and ranking directories (Forbes Advisor, G2, Vault, ClearlyRated) add another 12 percent. Structural sources like Yelp, BBB, and job boards account for the remaining 12 percent.

Industrial Staffing — publish it yourself

Of the six verticals we studied, industrial staffing is the most extreme case for self-publishing. Nearly four out of five Perplexity citations in this category go to content hosted on a staffing firm’s own domain — Aerotek, PeopleReady, Randstad, Express Pros, Adecco, Kelly Services. Trade press and industry research account for about 4 percent combined. Earned media is almost nonexistent.

Why? The ranking queries in this vertical — “top industrial staffing agencies,” “best manufacturing staffing companies,” “who are the leading construction staffing agencies” — are exactly the queries that established staffing firms have been targeting with SEO for years. The location-specific pages (“staffing agency in Tampa,” “industrial recruiting in Lakeland”) and the franchise-location pages (every PrideStaff or Express Pros office has its own URL) rank because they’re structured, relevant, and numerous.

Perplexity also leans heavily on B2B review platforms in this space — ClearlyRated in particular, which runs Net Promoter Score surveys of staffing firm clients and publishes the results. About one in ten citations in this vertical goes to a review platform, and appearing on ClearlyRated’s “Best of Staffing” list is one of the few earned-signal moves that reliably translates to AI visibility.

Vertical SaaS — reviews, LinkedIn, and your own blog

SaaS is the vertical where social platforms matter most. About one in six Perplexity citations in this category point to LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, or Substack essays — often written by industry analysts, SaaS founders, or VC partners. Another quarter go to B2B review platforms, overwhelmingly G2 and Capterra. The remaining two-thirds come from content the SaaS company itself publishes, whether on its own domain or as guest analysis on investor blogs like Bessemer’s Atlas or Bain Capital Ventures.

This vertical has almost no traditional earned media in its citation mix — roughly 1 percent. That doesn’t mean trade press doesn’t exist; it means Perplexity isn’t citing it when answering “best vertical SaaS companies” or “leading legal practice management software.” Instead, it’s citing G2 reviews, Capterra comparison pages, VC portfolio blog posts, and the vendors’ own product documentation.

Logistics & Freight — trade press and YouTube

Freight and logistics is a mixed vertical. About half the citations come from self-published content, but the other half is split across trade press (roughly 20 percent), social platforms (14 percent, mostly YouTube), and data directories like 3PL Logistics and Inbound Logistics (13 percent). Transport Topics, Freight Caviar, FreightWaves, and the Journal of Commerce all appear multiple times as cited sources.

This vertical has an unusually rich trade-press ecosystem, and Perplexity uses it. If you’re a freight broker or 3PL trying to earn citations, getting featured in Transport Topics’ annual rankings or landing a Freight Caviar profile is a legitimate strategy — not because earned media is dominant, but because it’s a reliable minority channel. YouTube matters more than in any other B2B vertical in our sample; the creators covering logistics on video get cited as authoritative sources.

Consumer Home Services — Yelp, Angi, BBB, and your own site

Home services is the vertical where directories matter most. More than a third of all Perplexity citations in this category go to Yelp, Angi, BBB, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, or Houzz. Another half go to content on the contractors’ own websites — usually service pages optimized for “HVAC in Tampa” or “plumber in Brandon.” Traditional trade press is essentially absent.

The story here is simple. When someone asks Perplexity “who are the best HVAC companies in Tampa,” Perplexity pulls from the same well-known local-discovery ecosystem that Google has always favored for local queries. Your ratings on those platforms, combined with your own on-site content, drive almost every citation in this category.

Professional Services — the ranking-directory vertical

Law firms, accounting firms, and consulting firms operate in the vertical most dominated by ranking directories. About 29 percent of Perplexity citations in this category go to Vault, Chambers, Legal 500, the Forbes lists, Best Lawyers, Super Lawyers, and similar authority-ranking sites. Another 22 percent go to traditional earned media — Wikipedia, trade press like the American Lawyer, CPA Practice Advisor, and Inside Public Accounting. Self-published content accounts for roughly 39 percent.

This is the vertical where reputation matters most and is hardest to fake. The ranking directories have decades of methodology and editorial vetting behind them; appearing on Chambers or Legal 500 isn’t something you engineer quickly. But it is possible to pitch to be considered, and firms that invest in those submissions benefit from the citation flow those directories generate.

Commercial Insurance — the earned-media vertical

Commercial insurance is the only vertical in our study where earned authority is the single largest citation bucket. Roughly 36 percent of citations go to trade press (Insurance Business Magazine, Insurance Journal, Reinsurance News, AM Best News), research firms (S&P Global, III, Statista), and regulatory bodies (NAIC, state insurance departments). Another 22 percent go to affiliate listicles — Bankrate, NerdWallet, U.S. News, Forbes Advisor, Investopedia — which function as consumer-commerce aggregators. Self-published content accounts for just 33 percent.

If you’re a commercial insurance carrier or broker, this is the one vertical in the study where a traditional PR-first strategy still pencils out. The trade press ecosystem is real, well-indexed, and regularly cited. So are the affiliate commerce networks that rank insurance products. Winning in this vertical means showing up in both.

What this means for your AEO strategy

The generic advice — “earn media coverage, build PR, get mentioned in top publications” — is correct for one out of six verticals we studied. For the other five, it’s either wrong, misleading, or describes at best a secondary channel. The primary channel in most industries is content the brand publishes itself.

That doesn’t make AEO trivial. Publishing content on your own domain still requires the content to be good, well-structured, and relevant to the queries your buyers are actually asking. But it does mean the cheapest, fastest, and most reliable way to earn Perplexity citations in most industries is to publish the right content on your own website — not to pitch reporters at Forbes.

If you’re evaluating an AEO strategy or a vendor proposing one, the question to ask is this: does the proposed playbook match what actually works in your specific industry? A one-size-fits-all AEO package that centers on PR and earned media will underperform badly in staffing, SaaS, and home services. A package that centers on review management and directory optimization will underperform in commercial insurance and professional services. The industries don’t share a single answer.

Methodology and limitations

This study analyzed 1,195 Perplexity citations from responses to ranking-intent queries (“top X companies,” “best X providers,” “leading X”) across six verticals: commercial insurance, industrial staffing, logistics and freight, professional services, vertical SaaS, and consumer home services. Each cited URL was classified by source type using a taxonomy that distinguishes content the brand publishes itself, content published on third-party platforms, affiliate and ranking-directory content, traditional earned media, and structural directories.

Classifications were made through a combination of manual review and rule-based automation. Domains representing high citation volumes were reviewed individually; the long tail of single-citation domains was classified using pattern rules based on domain and URL structure. About 54 percent of rows carry high-confidence classifications; the remainder are best-guess labels. The overall distributional patterns are robust to that uncertainty, but we’d treat individual percentages within plus-or-minus five points rather than as exact figures.

This study covers Perplexity only. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude may cite different source types in different proportions; no claims here should be extended to those engines without separate verification. The six verticals we covered are not exhaustive — healthcare, financial services, real estate, and industrial manufacturing would likely reveal their own distinct patterns. And AI search is changing rapidly; citation patterns that hold today may shift within months.

This is Phase 1 of an ongoing research program. Phase 2 will expand the engine coverage and add additional verticals, with particular attention to how citation patterns evolve as the underlying models change.