Machine Relations Index

Source Behavior Study

A public research index of the sources answer engines cite when they respond to B2B buyer-intent questions. It tracks root domains, source roles, engine coverage, vertical coverage, and the prompts used to observe citation behavior.

4,182 domains·16,482 citations·12 observed days·5 engines

What this measures

Machine Relations is the discipline of becoming legible, credible, and citeable to machine-mediated discovery systems. The index measures the public source layer those systems use when answering commercial research questions.

4,182cited source domains
180active query prompts
9B2B vertical groups
5answer engines observed

The useful split is not owned versus earned. It is source function: editorial publications, analyst research, market databases, academic and government sources, community platforms, wire distribution, search/media platforms, and vendor-owned sources.

Source Role Summary

Source classDomainsCitationsCitation share
Editorial publication1951,1547%
Analyst and consulting research144242.6%
Market and company database211,0356.3%
Academic and government source573522.1%
Community and social platform97404.5%
Wire and press-release distribution61460.9%
Search or media platform26333.8%
Vendor-owned source3,87811,99872.8%

Top Cited Sources

Loading Machine Relations Index data...

Methodology

Answer-engine citation monitoring across Perplexity, ChatGPT Browse, Gemini grounding, Claude Web, and Google AI Mode. The Machine Relations Index includes every cited root domain from the observed B2B buyer-query set, classifies each source by role, and excludes raw cited URLs, evidence paths, provider payloads, placement availability, account metadata, and internal opportunity metadata from the public artifact.

Generated 2026-05-21 from rows observed since 2026-05-10. Machine-readable versions are available as markdown and JSON.

Machine Relations Index - Source Behavior Study