AI chat apps cite gov.uk most for everyday UK questions

gov.uk, which.co.uk and independent.co.uk head the list

The government site turned up as a source in about one answer in fourteen across all four assistants, the most of any site. Which?, the consumer group, and The Independent newspaper filled the next two places.

These are counts from a single month. Each search was typed once, word for word, from the UK, and AI answers change from one asking to the next, so this is a snapshot rather than what every user sees. ChatGPT and Gemini were read from their free apps; Claude and Perplexity were queried through their developer versions with web search switched on, which can behave differently from the apps people download. "Cited" means the assistant linked the site as a source.

Perplexity linked a source every time; Claude did so in about one answer in four

How often each app shows its sources at all shapes how much weight its favourites can carry. Perplexity attached at least one link to every answer, the highest of the four assistants, and packed in the most links per answer. Claude sat at the other end, citing a site in just over a quarter of its answers, the lowest of the four.

ChatGPT and Gemini fell between them. The practical upshot for anyone reading the tables: Perplexity's choices rest on thousands of links, while a handful of Claude citations can reshuffle its ranking.

ChatGPT and Gemini both send people to gov.uk first

Taken one app at a time, the picture stays mostly British. ChatGPT's most-cited site was gov.uk, appearing in 13.6% of its answers, and Gemini also put gov.uk first, at a lower share.

Claude's favourite was expertreviews.co.uk, though it appeared in under one in fifty of Claude's answers, too thin to read much into. Perplexity is the one assistant of the four whose top site carries a .com address: goodhousekeeping.com, cited in roughly one answer in ten. Good Housekeeping publishes its UK and US editions under that one address, and this count does not separate them.

Most of the sites AI cites sit outside Google's top ten

The assumption about American sources does not hold at the top of the list. A second assumption, that AI apps simply repeat Google's front page, fares worse, as our earlier look at the same panel also found.

For every one of the four assistants, more than three-quarters of the sites it cited were missing from Google's top ten ordinary results for the very same search. Perplexity and Claude were neck-and-neck at around nine in ten; ChatGPT and Gemini were neck-and-neck just under eight in ten. "Top ten" here means the first ten unpaid results on one mobile check of google.co.uk for that search in the same month. Google varies its results by person and place, so that check is itself a snapshot.

The link an assistant hands over is usually a different page from the one a person would have clicked on Google. For a business, ranking well and being cited by an AI answer are two separate jobs.

What this means for UK businesses

Check the sources, app by app. The four assistants lean on different sites, so type your customers' real questions into each one and note which websites appear underneath the answer.

Treat Google rankings and AI citations as separate goals. Most cited sites were not in Google's top ten, so a strong ranking report says little about whether an assistant will link to you.

Earn a place on the sites assistants already use. Government guidance, consumer reviews and national news sit at the top of the list. Being accurately covered or reviewed on established UK sites in your field is a route into those answers.

Make sure AI search crawlers can reach you. If your site blocks them, you cannot be cited. You can still decide separately whether your content is used to train models.

OpenAI's own list of its crawlers, showing which one powers search and which one gathers training data. Source: platform.openai.com, captured 29 October 2026.

Google's documentation of its crawlers and the Google-Extended control. Source: developers.google.com, captured 29 October 2026.

Back at the kitchen table, the person asking about a parking fine is more likely than the stereotype suggests to be sent somewhere British. Whether that somewhere is your website is a question Google's own rankings cannot answer for you.

How we built it

This analysis used a fixed panel of 360 everyday UK searches across twelve topics: shopping, home, health, money, travel, food, tech, motoring, jobs, legal, fashion and property. In October 2026 each search was typed once, word for word, from the UK, into four AI assistants, giving 1,440 answers. ChatGPT and Gemini were read from their free chat apps. Perplexity (Sonar) and Claude (Haiku 4.5) were queried through their developer interfaces with web search switched on, which can produce different answers from their consumer apps.

A site counts as "cited" when the assistant linked it as a source. Links to Google Maps or to a Google search page were not counted as cited sites. Every figure is a direct count from one snapshot: AI answers vary from one asking to the next, and one answer per search is not every user's experience. The search list was chosen to cover common kinds of everyday question; it is not a random sample, so no figure here should be read as statistically representative of all UK queries.

Google's top ten is the first ten organic (unpaid, non-feature) results from one mobile check of the same search on google.co.uk in the same month. Web addresses ending in .uk were treated only as a guide to a UK publisher. Sites were not classified by country of origin.

Per-assistant figures, October 2026 (360 answers each)

Most-cited sites across all four assistants (share of 1,440 answers)

Pairs of assistants citing at least one same site for the same search

Google AI Overviews on the same 360 searches, October 2026