New analysis suggests that brands are increasingly being used by AI systems without being visibly credited in the answer itself, creating what Kevin Indig calls a "ghost citation" problem. In other words, a model may draw on a publisher’s or brand’s content, attach a source link, and still leave the brand name out of the text. Indig’s Growth Memo analysis, which Search Engine Journal highlighted, says this disconnect matters because citation and mention are not the same form of visibility.

The dataset behind the study spans 3,981 domain appearances across 115 prompts, 14 countries and four AI search systems. It found that 74.9% of domains were cited, while only 38.3% were mentioned by name, leaving 61.7% of citations effectively invisible. Only 13.2% of appearances produced both a citation and a mention, underlining the scale of the gap.

The behaviour varies sharply by model. According to the analysis, Gemini is far more likely to name brands than to link to them, while ChatGPT tends to do the opposite, heavily favouring citations over mentions. Google AI Overviews sit between the two, while Google’s AI Mode is described as somewhat more brand-friendly than ChatGPT but still closer to a footnoted style than a conversational one. The result is that a brand can look visible in one system and anonymous in another.

The pattern also depends on the kind of content a brand publishes. Aggregators and academic-style sources were repeatedly cited yet rarely named, while consumer brands with strong public recognition were much more likely to appear directly in the text. The study found that prompt format matters too: comparison and recommendation-style queries tend to generate more brand mentions than straightforward informational prompts, which often feed the model without surfacing the brand itself.

There is also a geographic dimension. Indig’s analysis found higher mention rates in markets such as India and Sweden, while Italy, Brazil and the Netherlands skewed towards stronger citation rates and lower brand naming. The UK and Canada were in the middle of the pack. Because the prompts were localised, the difference is less likely to be a language issue than a sign that query style and model behaviour vary by market.

For brands, the practical lesson is that AI visibility needs to be measured more precisely than a single aggregate score. Seer Interactive and other industry observers argue that brands should make their name inseparable from key claims, build stronger entity associations, and tailor content for different model behaviours. That advice is echoed by tools providers tracking both citations and mentions, as the market begins to distinguish between being referenced and being recognised.

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Source: Noah Wire Services