The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Perplexity (September 2026)

Unlike a general chatbot, Perplexity is an answer engine first: it was designed to respond to questions with linked references up front. That model has found a real audience, with the company reporting hundreds of millions of queries a month and tens of millions of active users worldwide. It’s also unusually candid about sourcing, which makes its citation mix especially revealing.

To map it, we tracked every domain Perplexity cited across a broad set of US queries, then ranked them by mention share — each domain’s slice of all the citations the top sources collectively earn. The leader is www.reddit.com, capturing 21.6% of citations — the most concentrated top source of any assistant we looked at.

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Mention share = a domain’s citations as a percentage of the summed citations of the top sources. Data via Ahrefs Brand Radar · United States, all topics · September 2026.

#	Website	Mention share	vs last month	Pages cited	DR
1	www.reddit.com	21.6%	▲ 1	892,114	95
2	www.youtube.com	20.8%	▼ 1	1,059,603	99
3	en.wikipedia.org	6.3%	–	110,188	97
4	www.facebook.com	4.5%	–	158,230	100
5	www.amazon.com	3.6%	▲ 1	105,853	96
6	www.healthline.com	2.6%	▲ 3	14,312	92
7	www.alibaba.com	2.0%	▼ 2	58,974	92
8	www.oreateai.com	1.8%	▲ 4	50,306	73
9	www.goodhousekeeping.com	1.7%	▲ 11	6,742	90
10	www.nytimes.com	1.6%	▲ 28	6,259	94
11	www.tripadvisor.com	1.5%	▲ 6	79,279	93
12	www.consumerreports.org	1.3%	▲ 7	11,164	90
13	www.webmd.com	1.3%	▲ 10	9,429	92
14	www.target.com	1.3%	▼ 6	47,699	91
15	www.instagram.com	1.2%	▼ 4	42,991	100
16	www.forbes.com	1.2%	▲ 9	9,289	94
17	www.techradar.com	1.1%	▲ 9	9,185	91
18	www.nerdwallet.com	1.1%	▲ 4	5,545	90
19	pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov	1.1%	NEW	29,526	95
20	www.medicalnewstoday.com	1.0%	▲ 12	7,155	91
21	www.edmunds.com	1.0%	▼ 14	28,892	86
22	www.businessinsider.com	1.0%	▲ 2	8,132	92
23	www.yelp.com	0.9%	▼ 2	32,085	94
24	www.linkedin.com	0.9%	▼ 10	32,209	99
25	finance.yahoo.com	0.9%	NEW	27,301	94
26	www.trustpilot.com	0.8%	▲ 10	22,632	94
27	www.kbb.com	0.8%	▼ 17	24,970	89
28	www.wikihow.com	0.8%	▲ 2	12,342	91
29	www.cnet.com	0.8%	▲ 4	7,926	91
30	www.homedepot.com	0.8%	▲ 7	13,257	90
31	www.pcmag.com	0.8%	▲ 9	5,819	90
32	medium.com	0.8%	▼ 4	19,369	94
33	www.etsy.com	0.7%	▼ 17	48,212	94
34	www.bestbuy.com	0.7%	▼ 7	24,368	89
35	www.thespruce.com	0.7%	NEW	4,772	90
36	www.caranddriver.com	0.7%	▼ 18	7,108	86
37	www.bobvila.com	0.7%	▲ 9	3,445	85
38	www.cars.com	0.7%	▼ 23	19,405	85
39	health.clevelandclinic.org	0.7%	NEW	2,445	92
40	www.rtings.com	0.6%	▲ 10	6,222	78
41	play.google.com	0.6%	NEW	27,206	99
42	www.tomsguide.com	0.6%	▲ 3	5,846	87
43	my.clevelandclinic.org	0.6%	NEW	4,048	92
44	www.cosmopolitan.com	0.6%	NEW	4,441	89
45	www.lemon8-app.com	0.6%	▼ 4	16,226	81
46	www.cargurus.com	0.6%	▼ 17	8,484	78
47	www.walmart.com	0.5%	▼ 13	24,372	92
48	shop.tiktok.com	0.5%	▼ 35	23,138	97
49	carinterior.alibaba.com	0.5%	▼ 18	14,182	92
50	www.ebay.com	0.5%	NEW	19,322	93

The numbers come from Ahrefs’ Brand Radar, which tracks the responses AI platforms give to a large, search-backed set of real user queries. For this article, we looked at every domain Perplexity cited across over 3.1 million US queries spanning all topics, then counted how often each domain appeared as a source.

For each website we report:

Mention share — a domain’s citations as a percentage of the summed citations of the top 50 most-cited sources. It shows how much of Perplexity’s “source attention” each website captures.
vs last month — how the domain’s rank has moved since the previous monthly snapshot (▲ climbed, ▼ fell, or NEW if it wasn’t in last month’s top 50).
Pages cited — the number of distinct pages on the domain that Perplexity cited, a measure of how broadly the site is referenced rather than how often.
DR (Domain Rating) — Ahrefs’ 0–100 measure of a website’s backlink-profile strength, included for context on each source’s overall authority.

This article is generated and automatically kept up to date every month by Agent A, our AI agent. Each month it pulls the latest Brand Radar data, recalculates mention share and rank movement, and refreshes the chart and table above — so the figures always reflect the most recent snapshot.

To track your brand’s presence in Perplexity, you’ll need to use Ahrefs’ Brand Radar.

Measure your brand’s visibility in Perplexity, see the specific queries where your brand gets mentioned (and the ones where it doesn’t), the pages that mention your brand, and then compare every metric with your closest competitors:

Post bySi Quan Ong

Si Quan is a content marketer at Ahrefs. He has been involved in digital and content marketing for the past 5 years. Before he joined Ahrefs, he was content marketer at ReferralCandy, a 7-figure ARR SaaS company.

Si Quan has spoken at some of the industry’s largest conferences in the Asia region, which includes TIECon and Digital Marketing Skill Share. He has also written for some of the industry’s most popular blogs like Sumo and SmartBlogger.

His earliest work was marketing a product on Kickstarter, which eventually raised $150,000, more than double the original funding goal. The product was also featured on prominent tech websites, including Engadget, CNET and Digital Trends.