The 16 sources LLMs actually cite

Aelo's Citation Map ranks the sources cited across a customer's own scans, the ground truth for where LLMs pull their answers for that specific category. But before you can interpret your map, it helps to know the cross-category baseline: which sources actually matter, ranked by real LLM weighting.

This is our version. Compiled from public LLM training-data disclosures, our aggregated citation observations across ~1,000 scans, and, honestly, a decade of watching what shows up when we ask ChatGPT and Gemini “best X” questions in categories we care about.

Every ranking below is a working hypothesis. Aelo publishes methodology changes at /methodology so you can audit our reasoning; disagreement is welcome.

Tier 1, the load-bearing five

Reddit, Stack Exchange, YouTube, G2, and Wikipedia together account for roughly 60-70% of citations we've observed across scans in both B2B SaaS and consumer categories. These are the sources every brand needs a presence on before optimizing anywhere else.

Redditis the surprise for marketers coming from traditional SEO. Both OpenAI and Google licensed Reddit for training (~$60M/year on the Google side alone). The consequence: Reddit content is systemically over-weighted in AI answers relative to its share of the wider web. If your buyers ask “best CRM for Indian SMBs” on Gemini, you should assume the answer draws from r/entrepreneur, r/india, r/CRM. Being named in those comments is more valuable than a top-1 Google ranking.

Wikipediais the highest-weight source across all four models. If your brand doesn't have an article yet, the notability bar is real, but achievable. If it does, the article is more consequential than your homepage. Do not edit your own page; it will be reverted, and repeated violations can result in a permanent block.

Tier 2, the strategic layer

Capterra, Medium, Quora, Hacker News, TrustRadius, Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, and GitHub. These are where a brand goes from “findable” to “credible.”

The generally-underused pick here is AlternativeTo. It has a single specific job, surface up when someone asks “alternatives to X”, and it does that job across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity with remarkable consistency. The effort to add and maintain a listing is measured in tens of minutes; the payoff shows up in every alternatives query in your category.

Tier 3, the specialists

DEV Community, Trustpilot, and Substack are “long tail with a purpose.” Each one dominates a narrow slice: DEV for developer tutorials, Trustpilot for consumer trust queries, Substack for niche newsletter-driven thought leadership. If your category maps to one of these, the return can be outsized, but broad-brand investment here rarely pays back.

What to do with this

Three concrete actions:

1. Run your own Citation Map. Sign up for Aelo, run 5-10 scans in your top-intent prompts. The resulting citation map tells you which of these 16 sources actually matter for yourcategory, often it's 4-6 of them, not all 16.
2. Audit your presence on your tier-1s. Do you have a claimed G2 profile? A Wikipedia article? A recent substantive Reddit answer in your top-3 subreddits? If not, that's the shortest path to visibility gains.
3. Log interventions. Every source-directed action, a Reddit reply, a G2 review request, a Medium post, should be logged in Aelo's Interventions so you can measure whether it moved the visibility needle. Some will. Some won't. The receipts tell you which.