Which pages do AI answers cite? Ask "best X" and it's listicles. Ask "X alternatives" and 86% switch to comparison pages

1. What I measured, in one paragraph

I took one software category, project management tools, and asked three web-connected AI engines the same buying question in three shapes: "best X" (what is the best project management software for a small business), "X alternatives" (what are the best alternatives to Asana), and "X vs Y" (Asana vs monday.com). Two phrasings per shape, one run each, on Perplexity Sonar, GPT-4o with web search and Gemini 2.5 Flash with web search. That is 18 answers. I logged every URL each answer cited, 176 in total, fetched each page's title, and labeled it two ways: by shape (a "best X" listicle, a comparison-shaped page, or something else) and by owner (a vendor's own domain, a review directory like G2, a community like Reddit, or a media site or blog).

The question behind it came from an r/SEO thread where an AI-visibility tool builder reported that "alternatives"-shaped queries cite comparison pages 34% to 43% of the time versus 2.8% for "best X" queries, and asked for anyone with publisher-side data to confirm or refute it. The thread got one comment, since removed. The large 2026 citation studies could not answer either, because they classify cited pages by type across all queries and never cross that with the shape of the question. This pilot is a first attempt at that crossing, small enough to run in an afternoon and published in full so it can be challenged or extended.

2. Which pages get cited for "best X" questions?

Listicles, by a wide margin. For "what is the best project management software for a small business" and "best project management software in 2026", 84% of the 57 cited URLs were "best" or "top N" roundups. Comparison-shaped pages appeared once. The remaining 14% were category pages, a buyer's guide, a vendor's small-business page and two Reddit threads.

This matches what every large study has found and what most GEO advice repeats: for a "best" question, the engines reach for a page that already ranks the options. Two thirds of these citations came from media sites and blogs (Forbes Advisor, PCMag, ZDNET, Zapier, The Digital Project Manager); 18% came from vendors, and almost all of those were vendors' own "best project management software for small business" listicles; product pages barely appeared. Zero citations went to a vendor's comparison page. On this column alone, the standard advice (get into the roundups) looks complete.

3. What changes when the question becomes "X alternatives"?

The format flips. For "what are the best alternatives to Asana" and "Asana alternatives for a small team", 86% of the 59 cited URLs were comparison-shaped pages anchored on the brand: "Asana alternatives", "Asana competitors", "vs Asana". Generic "best project management software" listicles fell to 2%. And 24% of all citations went to comparison pages sitting on a competing vendor's own domain.

I could not find that 24% published anywhere. ClickUp's "Asana alternatives" guide sat in the same answer as Zapier, Forbes and TechRepublic, for the same question, on the same afternoon. Vendors took 27% of all citations in this shape against 18% for "best X", and the whole difference is comparison pages. The thread that prompted this study treated "get listed on directories" and "build comparison pages" as one tactic when seen at the citation level; in this data the second half did the work (section 5 has the directory numbers).

The 12% "other" slice is its own finding. It came almost entirely from the second phrasing, "Asana alternatives for a small team", on GPT-4o and Gemini: instead of roundups, they cited landing pages built for exactly that phrase - kanbo.dev/for/small-teams, t0ggles.com/for/small-teams, pinrom.co, dailybuddy.net. Five of their ten citations for that phrasing were little-known tools with a page that matched the words. If t0ggles sounds familiar, it is the same tool that took over two of three engines for a "small remote team" recommendation in my AI visibility stability experiment three weeks earlier. One qualifier in the question ("for a small team") was enough for a small vendor with one matching page to get in.

4. Do "X vs Y" questions cite anything but comparison pages?

Almost never. For "Asana vs monday.com: which should I choose?" and "is Asana or monday.com better for a small business?", 59 of 60 cited URLs were head-to-head comparison pages. No listicle was cited at all. The one exception was a Reddit thread about which workflows justify the cost of a tool.

The vendor-owned share here is lower than for "alternatives", at 8% (5 of 60), and it belongs to the two brands being compared: monday.com's own "Asana vs monday.com" post twice, Asana's compare page twice, Wrike's three-way comparison once. The rest went to media and blogs (78%), review directories (8%, G2's learning hub and Capterra's compare tool) and Reddit (5%). When your brand is one of the two names in the question, your own compare page has a shot (Asana and monday.com both got theirs cited). When it is a third name, the slot belongs to media comparisons, and no listicle appeared in it.

5. Does G2 or Capterra own the "alternatives" slot?

Not in this data. For "X alternatives" questions, review directories earned 1 of 59 citations - G2's own "Asana alternatives" page, once, on Perplexity. For "best X" they took 9% and for "X vs Y" 8%. The directories are present, but they are a small minority of what the engines cite, and they are least present exactly where comparison content matters most.

A G2 or Capterra profile does a different job from a comparison page on your own site. When someone asked for alternatives, the engines went to pages whose title answers that question, and the directory page rarely does. The absence of an incumbent is also what leaves room for the 24% vendor share. The domains that recur across all three shapes are the usual editorial roundup publishers: Zapier and Forbes with 12 citations each, Reddit with 10.

6. Do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cite the same pages?

No, and they cite very different amounts. Perplexity cited about 19 URLs per answer (116 citations across 6 answers, 89 unique); GPT-4o and Gemini with web search cited exactly 5 each (30 citations each). The shape pattern held on all three, but the strength differed: for "X alternatives", comparison-shaped pages were 97% of Perplexity's citations, 70% of GPT-4o's and 60% of Gemini's.

Two things sit behind those numbers. The GPT-4o and Gemini gap on "alternatives" is the small-team landing-page effect from section 3: both spent citations on tools like t0ggles and Kanbo for the qualified phrasing, and those count as vendor homepages under my labels. The second is a caveat about the setup. Through OpenRouter, GPT-4o and Gemini share one web-search plugin, and the overlap shows it: for "best X" they cited 9 of the same 10 URLs, for "X vs Y" 8 of 10. Perplexity runs its own retrieval and overlapped with either of them by only 2 to 5 URLs per question shape; for "alternatives" every pairwise overlap was between 1 and 4 URLs. An "AI citation share of N%" quoted without the engine name averages over lists that barely intersect, which is the same problem I measured for brand mentions in the 60-query stability experiment.

7. Why the published "under 3%" figure is not wrong, just averaged

Every large 2026 citation study reports comparison pages as a small slice: Wix Studio's AI Search Lab put "product alternative and comparison pages" under 3% of a million-plus citations, DeltaV Digital found 4.1%. Both are averages across every question people ask. Most questions are not shaped as "alternatives" or "vs", so the format is rare overall while being the default inside those two shapes.

DeltaV's pair of numbers already hinted at this. A page type with 4% of citations and the highest citations-per-retrieval of any type gets cited heavily whenever it is retrieved at all, which is how a format behaves when it owns a narrow set of questions and rarely appears elsewhere. DerivateX's 63% for third-party best-of lists and 12% for the recommended vendor is the "best X" column of this pilot, measured on Google AI Overviews instead of chat engines, and it agrees. What was missing was the other two columns.

8. What this means for a product or service site

The useful question is which shapes your buyers' questions take when they put them to an AI engine, because each shape cited a different kind of page. Three shapes gave three different answers here, and the page to build follows from the shape.

• If buyers ask "best [category]": your own site is a minority player (18% here, 12% to 17% in DerivateX's Google data). The slot belongs to third-party roundups. The work is earning a place in the roundups that already get cited - here that was Zapier, Forbes Advisor, PCMag, TechRepublic, The Digital Project Manager - and, secondarily, publishing your own category listicle, which did get cited (12% of "best X" citations were vendor listicles).
• If buyers ask "[leader] alternatives": this is the shape where your own domain competes. A brand-anchored page titled and structured as "[leader] alternatives" or "[leader] competitors" took 24% of citations for competing vendors in this pilot and G2 took 2%. Name the leader in the title and give the page real comparison content (pricing, fit, who should stay where they are). If your buyers add a qualifier ("for small teams", "for agencies"), a page built for that qualifier can beat every roundup - that is how t0ggles and Kanbo got cited, and it is the cheapest AI-search move a small business with one product can make.
• If buyers ask "[you] vs [rival]": your own compare page is in play (monday.com and Asana both got theirs cited), but the slot is mostly editorial. Publish the vs page, then make sure the media comparisons that exist are accurate about you, because they are 78% of what gets cited.

Page shape is one layer of generative engine optimization, and it comes before schema or prose style. Underneath it sits accuracy: when the engines already describe a product wrongly, the format cannot repair that, a problem I measured separately in how often AI gets business information wrong. Around it sits measurement, per engine, before and after, which is the baseline I take in an SEO audit with an AI visibility baseline; section 6 shows why one engine's citation list says little about another's. The visitors these citations send are also the ones that convert better than organic search traffic, at least while volumes stay small. An AI search visibility program built from this evidence maps the question shapes buyers use and the page shapes those questions cite, then measures the result on each engine.

9. Explore all 116 cited pages

Every URL the three engines cited, with its page shape, owner type, the question shape and engine that cited it, and the page title I fetched. Filter, search, sort. Comparison-shaped pages are marked in green.

10. Methodology

One category was used as a testbed: project management software, with Asana as the anchor brand and monday.com as the rival. Six prompts were fixed in advance, two per question shape. "best X": "What is the best project management software for a small business?" and "Best project management software in 2026?". "X alternatives": "What are the best alternatives to Asana?" and "Asana alternatives for a small team". "X vs Y": "Asana vs monday.com: which should I choose?" and "Is Asana or monday.com better for a small business?". Each prompt was sent once to three web-enabled models through the OpenRouter API on September 7, 2026: Perplexity Sonar, OpenAI GPT-4o with the web plugin, and Google Gemini 2.5 Flash with the web plugin. Every URL returned in the answer's citation annotations was logged in order: 176 citations, 116 unique URLs.

Each unique URL was labeled by page shape from its URL path plus its fetched HTML title: comparison-shaped if anchored on a named brand as "alternatives", "competitors", "vs" or "compare"; listicle if a "best" or "top N" roundup without a brand anchor; other for everything else (category pages, guides, homepages, forum threads). A third-party post titled "10 best Asana alternatives" is comparison-shaped, because the question it answers is anchored on Asana; a "best project management software 2026: tools compared" roundup is a listicle. Each URL was also labeled by owner: vendor if the domain belongs to a project management tool on a fixed list of 29, directory for review platforms (G2 including its learning hub, Capterra, Software Advice, GetApp and similar), community for Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and Quora, and media-blog for everything else. Shares are computed over citations, so a URL cited by two answers counts twice; answer-weighted means, where each answer counts equally, are reported in the data file and agree in direction (comparison-shaped: 3% for "best X", 76% for "X alternatives", 99% for "X vs Y"). A path-only labeling, the method used in the Reddit thread, is stored alongside for every URL: for "alternatives" it gives 84.7% instead of 86.4%, but for "best X" it finds only 61% listicles instead of 84%, because many roundups do not carry "best" in their slug.

11. Limitations

This is a directional pilot. The effect is near-total and consistent across engines, which is why I am publishing it at this size, but the exact percentages are one category on one day and should be quoted as such.

Five honest caveats. First, scope: one category, one anchor pair, six prompts, one run each, 18 answers. Enough to show that the question shape switches the cited page shape; not enough to attach a confidence interval to any engine's number or to say how the vendor-owned share varies by market. Second, GPT-4o and Gemini were both queried through OpenRouter's web plugin, which means their candidate pages came from the same search backend - this is closer to two retrieval systems than three, and their high mutual overlap says so. Third, API answers are not the consumer ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity apps, which add personalization, memory and their own retrieval; treat these as the floor. Fourth, the labels are rule-based on path and title, and the vendor list is fixed, so a small tool not on the list counts as media-blog - the vendor share is a lower bound. Fifth, citation-weighted shares are dominated by Perplexity, which cites almost four times as many URLs per answer as the other two; that is why the answer-weighted means are reported next to them. I will extend this to more categories and repeated runs and update this page with the harder numbers.

12. Frequently asked questions

13. Get the data

Sources

1. Search Engine Land (Danny Goodwin). "AI citations favor listicles, articles, product pages: Study" - Wix Studio AI Search Lab data. March 24, 2026. searchengineland.com/ai-citations-favor-listicles-articles-product-pages-study-472364. Accessed September 7, 2026.
2. AirOps. "Which page types earn AI citations" - summary of Wix AI Search Lab data. 2026. airops.com/blog/page-types-earn-ai-citations. Accessed September 7, 2026.
3. Evertune, via Search Engine Land. "AI search loves listicles: What 25,000 URLs reveal about citations." May 19, 2026. searchengineland.com/ai-search-loves-listicles-what-25000-urls-reveal-about-citations-477682. Accessed September 7, 2026.
4. DeltaV Digital. "AI search citations study: what 25,000+ citations reveal." 2026. deltavdigital.com/resources/reports/ai-citation-study/. Accessed September 7, 2026.
5. DerivateX. "What content gets cited in Google AI Overviews: 2026 data." June 2026. derivatex.agency/blog/what-content-gets-cited-google-ai-overviews/. Accessed September 7, 2026.
6. r/SEO. "Do your /vs and /alternatives pages get cited by AI answers far more than your 'best X' content?" September 1, 2026. reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1w4e6s2/. Accessed September 7, 2026. The thread that prompted this pilot.

Published: September 7, 2026. Original pilot by Stanislav Peev. Directional first run; I will extend it to more categories and repeated runs and update this page. Method or figures look off? Email me - the raw data is published so it can be checked.