Research  /  Crypto AI Visibility Index  /  September 2026

Where AI gets its answers

3,987 citations across 849 domains, from 480 answers about cross-border money. Reddit beats every vendor, publisher and regulator.

Reddit is the most-cited source in the corpus

Kunzum's Crypto AI Visibility Index recorded every source the engines cited across 480 answers to cross-border money questions, collected in September 2026. That produced 3,987 citations across 849 distinct domains. reddit.com is first, at 293.

No vendor, publisher, bank or regulator is cited more often than a forum. The twenty most-cited domains are below.

DomainCitationsShare of all citations
reddit.com2937.3%
wise.com1854.6%
stripe.com882.2%
youtube.com812.0%
linkedin.com481.2%
worldfirst.com471.2%
facebook.com461.2%
remitly.com441.1%
westernunion.com391.0%
deel.com360.9%
payoneer.com350.9%
airwallex.com320.8%
bankrate.com260.7%
crossriver.com240.6%
givedirectly.org240.6%
nerdwallet.com230.6%
toku.com230.6%
opendue.com210.5%
federalreserve.gov210.5%
bvnk.com210.5%

Source: sources.csv, 1,108 rows covering all 849 domains.

Editorial press is a rounding error

Grouping those 849 domains by what kind of source they are gives the allocation argument in one table. Vendor documentation dominates. Forum and social content is a clear second. Press coverage, the thing most crypto marketing budgets are pointed at, accounts for 26 citations out of nearly four thousand.

Source typeCitationsShare
Vendor and other340985.5%
Forum and social49312.4%
Aggregator501.3%
Editorial press260.7%
Developer docs90.2%

What that means if you want to be cited

Your own documentation and the threads people write about you are the corpus these engines draw on. A press release is not in the room. That is not an argument against press, which does other jobs, but it is an argument against expecting press to put you in an AI answer.

Each engine reads a different internet

The aggregate hides how differently the four engines source their answers. Perplexity cites Reddit 222 times on its own. ChatGPT's most-cited domain is wise.com, and it reaches for the IMF more readily than for a forum. Google AI Overviews leans on YouTube and Facebook, which no other engine does at all.

EngineDistinct domainsTotal citationsMost cited
chatgpt205433wise.com (36), payoneer.com (19), stripe.com (15)
claude174322fasset.com (6), airwallex.com (6), deel.com (6)
google_aio282919youtube.com (68), reddit.com (66), wise.com (43)
perplexity4472313reddit.com (222), wise.com (101), worldfirst.com (33)

Perplexity draws on 447 distinct domains, more than twice Claude's 174. If you are optimising for one engine you are optimising for one of these columns, not for all four.

Half of ChatGPT's answers never touched the web

Enabling web search on these APIs permits retrieval. It does not force it. The Crypto AI Visibility Index recorded, for every response, whether the engine actually ran a search.

EngineRan a web searchRate
chatgpt65/12054%
claude78/12065%
perplexity120/120100%

Google AI Overviews is excluded because it is a search surface and always retrieves. Recorded per response in raw_publishable.csv, column web_search_ran.

This matters for anything built on citation counts. Roughly half of what ChatGPT said in this study came from training rather than retrieval, which means no amount of publishing would have changed those particular answers. Citation work moves the retrieved half.