Citation in AI Search

Extracted Attributes

• Purpose

  Ground AI-generated answers in current internet content, increase transparency, allow users to verify information

• Definition

  Practice of providing inline source citations within synthesized responses generated by AI-powered search engines

• Key Implementer

  Perplexity AI

• Legal Challenges

  Copyright infringement, unauthorized content use, trademark issues

• Competitor Adoption

  Google's 'AI Overviews'

• Impact on Publishers

  Diminishes visibility of primary news organizations, deprives them of direct traffic, threatens digital traffic, audience engagement, and revenue generation

• Problematic Citation Practices

  Citing syndicated/republished versions instead of original publisher, generating broken/fabricated URLs, over 60% of AI-generated responses contain incorrect/misleading information, misattributing sources

• Alleged Content Acquisition Method

  Undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape content

• Benefits for Businesses (Local SEO)

  Stronger local visibility, improved search engine ranking, attracts more customers, signals authenticity

• APA Style Guidance (AI as search engine)

  Generally not necessary to cite AI if used as a search engine; users should visit and read cited sources to ensure they are real, trustworthy, and relevant.

Timeline

• Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. (Source: Summary, Wikipedia)

  2022

• Digital Content Next published a blog post titled 'AI search has a news citation problem', detailing issues such as misattribution and impact on publishers. (Source: Web Search Results)

  2025-03-24

• A study by Wakeling et al. (2025) highlighted that up to 16% of citations across disciplines contain issues, a problem potentially perpetuated by AI-generated summaries. (Source: Web Search Results)

  2025

• Perplexity AI, Inc. was valued at US$18 billion. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-07

Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI, Inc., or simply Perplexity, is an American privately held software company offering a web search engine that processes user queries and synthesizes responses. Perplexity products use large language models and incorporate real-time web search capabilities, providing responses based on current Internet content, including inline source citations. A free public version is available, while a paid Pro subscription offers access to more advanced language models and additional features. Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. As of July 2025, the company was valued at US$18 billion. Perplexity AI has attracted legal scrutiny over allegations of copyright infringement, unauthorized content use, and trademark issues from several major media organizations, including the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times. According to separate analyses by Wired and later Cloudflare, Perplexity uses undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of news websites who disallow or explicitly block web scraping.

Web Search Results

• AI Search Makes Local Listings More Important Than Ever

  There’s been a lot of talk about citations in the context of AI search. For traditional SEOs, citations mean unlinked brand mentions, i.e., your business being mentioned in a news article, blog post, or PR, but without a direct link back to your site. While these have always been part of a solid online presence, now these unlinked mentions, along with local citations and listings, are being seen as key for ranking in AI searches. [...] The rise of AI search is a game-changer for how your business needs to approach getting found online. To make sure your business stays in the running in this new era, here’s what you need to focus on in terms of citations and listings: ### 1. Build and optimize your foundational citations (including niche and key directories) [...] Obviously, for local SEOs, citations are something we’ve been using for years. Citations in the form of local listings and aggregators used to be absolutely vital for local visibility. In recent years, they have become more of a foundational task. But with AI-driven search on the rise, they’re making a big comeback, often being referenced directly by these new AI platforms. Chatgpt results for the search of Portuguese Restaurants South London

• AI Citations for Better Business Visibility - Ranking By SEO

  ## Advanced AI Citation Strategy Citations must go beyond basic NAP consistency as search develops into an ecosystem driven by AI. To future-proof local visibility, the next generation of AI citation statistics emphasizes multimodal experiences, predictive analytics, and integration with cutting-edge AI platforms. Multimodal Citation Integration [...] Stronger Local Visibility-AI citations give search engines signals that your business is authentic and loved by numerous people. This helps improve your search engine ranking and attract more customers. You have a better chance of showing up in the top local results if information like your address or phone number stays the same across all platforms. [...] AI-driven search engines like Google SGE, Bing Chat, and Apple’s AI Search will rely on multiple content formats—not just text. These days, optimizing images and videos for citations is very important. For example, integrating location data (geo-tagging) in images of your store or products ensures they pop up in AI-powered image searches. Similarly, video citations—like inserting legitimate business details in YouTube descriptions and transcripts—improve trust indicators.

• Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 2—AI as a search engine and ...

  With Google and other search engines integrating AI into search and AI tools increasingly able to cite their sources, the distinction between traditional search engines and AI-powered search engines is growing slim. If you used AI as a search engine or intermediary to find information, similar to using Google search or a database search, it is in most cases not necessary to cite AI at all. It is the same as if you used Google search to find a source: After reading those sources, if you quote or [...] If you use an AI tool to search, make sure the AI cites sources and that you visit and read the sources yourself to ensure that they are real, not hallucinations or confabulations of the AI, as well as trustworthy and relevant for use in your paper. Citations that do not support or mischaracterize information are a longstanding issue in scientific research, affecting up to 16% of citations across disciplines (Wakeling et al., 2025). AI-generated summaries may perpetuate the problem, with recent [...] Because there are many issues to explore surrounding AI, we have split our advice into different posts. This will also allow us to add additional posts as needed in the future. This post is about two cases in which it is likely not necessary to cite or disclosure the use of AI, which is when using AI as a search engine and when AI is integrated into common software. Additional posts are available on these topics:

• AI search has a news citation problem - Digital Content Next

  When AI search engines provide sources, they cite syndicated or republished versions rather than providing a citation for the original publisher. This practice diminishes the visibility of primary news organizations and deprives them of direct traffic. Even more troubling, some platforms, such as Grok and Gemini, regularly generate broken or fabricated URLs, misleading users and reducing referral traffic to legitimate news sites. ## AI platforms ignore publisher controls [...] For media companies, the rise of AI search directly threatens digital traffic, audience engagement, and revenue generation. Traditional search engines drive referral traffic to news sites, supporting subscription models, advertising revenue, and brand visibility. If AI search tools continue to bypass proper citation and link attribution, they could significantly weaken publishers’ brand recognition, authority, and ability to monetize their content. [...] The Tow Center analysis studies eight AI-powered search tools: Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, and Grok. The research concludes that over 60% of AI-generated responses contain incorrect or misleading information. Unlike traditional search engines that list multiple sources for verification, generative AI tools present single, authoritative-sounding answers—often with a false sense of confidence.

• AI Search Has A Citation Problem - Columbia Journalism Review

  Furthermore, our findings represent just one occurrence of each of the excerpts being queried in the AI search tools. Because AI chatbots’ responses are dynamic and can vary in response to the same query, the chances are high that if someone ran the exact same prompts again, they would get different outputs. Download our data _Kaylee Williams, Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen, and Dhrumil Mehta contributed to this report._ [...] The generative search tools we tested had a common tendency to cite the wrong article. For instance, DeepSeek misattributed the source of the excerpts provided in our queries 115 out of 200 times. This means that news publishers’ content was most often being credited to the wrong source. [...] We deliberately chose excerpts that, if pasted into a traditional Google search, returned the original source within the first three results. We ran sixteen hundred queries (twenty publishers times ten articles times eight chatbots) in total.We manually evaluated the chatbot responses based on three attributes: the retrieval of (1) the correct article, (2) the correct publisher, and (3) the correct URL.According to these parameters, each response was marked with one of the following labels: