AI search cites deep pages nine times in ten

When AI search cites a website, it cites a deep page nine times in ten. Of 8,090 citations in our scans, read on 14 October 2026, 9.5% pointed at a homepage and 90.5% at a page further into the site.

Measured 14 October 2026. Published 15 October 2026. Updated 15 October 2026.

What we measured

We read every AI visibility scan stored in AfterLaunch, read-only, at no cost. A scan asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini the questions a site's customers ask, and keeps every source each answer cites. The same scan is sometimes stored twice, so duplicates were counted once.

A citation counts as a homepage citation when its path, with the query string and fragment dropped, is / or empty. Every other path is a deep page: docs, a comparison, a pricing page, a blog post. Counting locale roots such as /en or /home as homepages too moves no figure by more than 0.3 points.

We left out internal accounts, test accounts, our own seed accounts and research runs that have no owner. That leaves 27 scans of 26 sites. A further 759 citations could not be resolved to a page and are never counted as homepages. Gemini mostly returns a redirect wrapper that hides the real address, 757 of its 803 citations in this pool, so it is left out of the engine figures.

The caveat that comes with every number

Ten of the 26 sites are boards we set up on 14 October for other people's small SaaS products, as outreach. The other 16 are eight trial accounts and eight people who ran the free scan and left an email. The ten boards hold 1,978 of the 8,090 citations, about 24%, so every result below is given twice: with those boards and without them. The direction is the same both ways.

The result

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Counting each distinct page once per scan, instead of every citation, gives the same answer: 604 of 6,365 pages were homepages, 9.5%, or 399 of 4,699, 8.5%, without the boards.

We wrote our guess down before the run: deep pages would take 70 to 85% of citations, and a homepage share above 40% would kill the idea. Deep pages took more than we guessed, 90.5%, or 91.1% without the boards.

What this does not show

We also asked whether a small site gets cited on its homepage more often, since it has fewer deep pages to offer. The four cited sites under 20 pages were cited on the homepage in 8 of their 10 citations, against 13 of 71 for larger sites. Without the boards it is 5 of 7 for the two small sites still cited, against 6 of 16 for larger ones. Two of those four small sites are our own outreach boards, and some sites in the small band are sites whose pages we failed to count. Read it as a direction, not a rate.

Size here means the pages our audit found at the scan, not the age of the site, which we do not store. Citation records repeat when one question is sampled more than once, which is why we also counted distinct pages; the two counts agree.

A tooling note for anyone repeating this: our hardened page fetcher fails every request under Node 26, so our research runs that fetch pages use Node 22. This read made no fetches, so it was not affected.

The free trick: write the page, then read the HTML

You can do this tonight without an account. Pick one question your customers ask an AI assistant, the kind that ends in a recommendation. Write one page on your site that answers it in the opening paragraph: who the product is for, what it does for that need, what it costs and where it is a poor fit.

Then check the answer is in the HTML your server sends, not only in what the browser draws once scripts have run. A crawler that does not run JavaScript reads only that HTML. Put your page address and a phrase from your answer into this:

A 0 means the phrase is missing from the server-sent HTML. View Source in your browser shows the same thing. If the answer only appears after scripts run, render that part on the server.

What AfterLaunch does with it

AfterLaunch reads the sources the engines cite for your customers' questions and notes which of them are pages on your site. On your Board it ranks the deep page worth writing next, with the questions it should answer, and hands that move to your AI when you say yes. You publish the page, or your AI does.