Who actually gets cited
Ask which websites AI engines actually trust enough to quote, and the answer is surprisingly concentrated. Across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the other major AI search products, Reddit comes out as the single most-cited domain, carrying roughly 40% aggregate citation signal on its own.
Wikipedia is close behind in raw share — it alone accounts for somewhere between 26% and 48% of ChatGPT's top-10 citations, depending on the query category. LinkedIn rounds out the top five, dominant specifically for B2B and executive-focused questions.
Why these three sites win
None of them are traditional publishers. What they share is structure an AI system can parse with confidence — Reddit's threaded, attributed, first-person answers; Wikipedia's tightly cited, entity-linked prose; LinkedIn's verified-identity, professional-context posts.
They're not winning on domain authority in the old SEO sense — they're winning because their content format happens to match what a retrieval-and-extraction pipeline is good at pulling a clean answer out of.
What you can actually control
For anyone whose domain isn't Reddit, Wikipedia, or LinkedIn: you don't need their traffic or their backlink profile to compete for citation.
You need the same structural clarity at the page level — a direct, attributable, verifiable answer near the question it answers, backed by real sourcing. That's a controllable, page-by-page fix, not a years-long domain-authority campaign.