I measured which sites AI search actually surfaces. Reddit won by 3x. I got zero.

I run five niche comparison sites. Two months in, I wanted to know something specific: when someone asks an AI a question in my categories, whose pages come back?

Not "is AI search important" — I can read that in any newsletter. I wanted the actual list of domains.

So I built a probe and ran ten queries across five categories: VPN, antivirus, project management, HR software, and AI writing tools. For each query I pulled the result set and counted every external domain that surfaced.

One result was so lopsided I re-ran it to make sure I hadn't broken something.

Reddit appeared in all ten queries. 275 mentions.

Second place was pcmag.com with 85. Reddit beat it by 3.2x.

That's not a category quirk. It held in VPN, antivirus, project management, HR software and AI tools — all five. It was the only domain that appeared across every single category I tested. G2 was in three. Forbes in three. Cnet in two.

I expected the majors to dominate. I did not expect one site to show up in literally every query while established publishers appeared intermittently.

The reason, I think, is that these questions ("best X for Y", "A vs B") are exactly what gets argued about in threads. Someone asking which HR tool to pick isn't looking for a vendor's feature table. They're looking for what went wrong for someone else.

The finding that actually changed my plan

I assumed the top of these lists would be publishers with staff and budgets. Partly true — pcmag, cnet, forbes, techradar are all there.

But sitting right alongside them: allaboutcookies.org, top10vpn.com, privacytools.io, comparitech.com, peoplemanagingpeople.com, fitsmallbusiness.com, culturemonkey.io, talenthr.io, thedigitalprojectmanager.com, project-management.com, zenpilot.com, askaichat.app.

Several of those are smaller than mine.

That reframed the problem completely. If scale were the barrier, my result — zero appearances across all ten queries — would be expected and I'd have nothing to do about it. But scale clearly isn't the barrier. Which means my zero is a thing I did wrong, not a thing that's impossible.

That's a much more useful conclusion than "AI search is hard for new sites."

I got zero, and I want to be precise about what I measured

My five sites: zero appearances. Not one, in any query, in any category.

Now the caveat, which matters more than the number. I counted search result domains, not verbatim citations inside AI summaries. AI summaries are generally generated from those result sets, so the two correlate closely — but they are different measurements.

I could have written this up as "we are never cited by AI." That would be a stronger story and it would be wrong. What I measured is "we don't surface in the result sets these answers get built from." Close enough to act on, and I'd rather state the weaker true thing.

The other thing I checked first was whether something was broken: Cloudflare blocking crawlers, robots.txt disallowing AI bots, a missing sitemap. All clean — seven different AI crawler user agents returned 200 on every site, llms.txt serving fine. The plumbing works. There's nobody to blame but the strategy.

What I'm doing about it

Two things, in order.

Reddit first. Not because I enjoy it, but because it's the only source that crossed every category. If discussion is where these answers come from, that's where the work is — and it isn't work I can automate my way through.

Then the domains on that list that are my size. Those are the realistic targets for being linked to or mentioned. Asking a publisher with a staff for a link is a different game than talking to someone running a site like mine.

And I've stopped treating "authority" as a thing that accrues from publishing more. Whatever signals those smaller sites have, they aren't volume.

The reusable bit

If you run a site and want to know where you actually stand, this takes an afternoon: pick five to ten queries you genuinely want to win, pull each result set, count domains. Don't measure your own rankings — measure who else is there.

That inversion is the whole value. Rankings tell you about you. The domain count tells you who you're actually competing with, and half the time it's not who you assumed.

If you want this run on your own categories — real counts, not vibes — that's the kind of work I do: https://yongrui-services.pages.dev/