The citation rate, in numbers
If you tried to measure how often ChatGPT cites a real website in June 2025, you'd have found it happening on roughly 1.6% of relevant queries — enough to know it mattered, not enough to build a strategy around.
By May 2026, that number had climbed to approximately 6.8%. More than a fourfold increase in under a year is the kind of growth curve that turns a 'watch this space' feature into a channel worth measuring on its own dashboard.
Where it's already working
The industry breakdown is where it gets genuinely useful. Travel & Hospitality sits around 23% citation rate, Automotive around 20% — categories where people ask ChatGPT open-ended, comparison-heavy questions it's well suited to answer with a cited source.
Professional Services, by contrast, is still under 4%, likely because those queries skew toward advice that's harder to verify or that ChatGPT is more cautious about attributing to a specific business.
Where the opportunity is
The takeaway isn't 'wait for your industry to catch up.' It's the opposite: if your category is still in single digits, that's exactly where a page-level AEO pass has the most room to move the needle.
Clear direct answers, verifiable specifics, structured data that confirms who's saying it — because so few competitors in that space have bothered yet.