If you had one hour to move your brand's AI citation rate up, where would you spend it? On the website? Or off it? Across the 226 Indian brands in the June 2026 Cited Index, only 4.1% of AI citations point back to the brand's own website. The other 95.9% live on Amazon, Nykaa, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, editorial sites, and analyst reports. That single ratio is the most important number for a marketing lead making an AEO and GEO budget call this quarter. It is also incomplete on its own, because at the category level the split moves. In Conversational AI, 78% of citations land on brand websites. In Personal Grooming, 57% land on marketplaces. The right allocation depends entirely on which of those two you sell in.
This piece names the allocation call, category by category, and gives you a way to run it against your own category before you spend a rupee.
Key findings
- Overall AI citation share across 226 Indian brands in June 2026: 4.1% brand-owned, 95.9% third-party
- Per-category brand-site citation share ranges from 20% (Audio and Wearables) to 78% (Conversational AI Platforms), a nearly 60-point spread
- Brand-site-dominated categories (Conversational AI 78%, HR and Payroll 71%, CRM and Sales 69%) reward on-site work as the primary investment
- Marketplace-dominated categories (Personal Grooming 57%, Baby Care 52%, Audio and Wearables 45%) reward off-site work as the primary investment
- Yellow.ai, the number-one brand in Conversational AI, wins 45% of ChatGPT answers on a brand-site strategy. Beardo, the number-one brand in Personal Grooming, wins on marketplace and YouTube presence. Both are #1 in their category. Neither playbook works in the other category.
The 4.1% is not the allocation number
Only 4.1% of AI citations point to your own domain. That number lands hard on a first read, and Salman uses it as the opener because it is the fastest way to break the founder-instinct that says the website is doing the work. Across every category in the June 2026 Cited Index, more than 9 in 10 AI citations live somewhere else.
For a marketing lead deciding where to spend the next hour, though, the 4.1% headline is a hazard. It suggests every brand should shift 96% of its AEO and GEO budget off-site. That is false for at least three of the ten Cited Index categories, and directionally false for two more. The right allocation call is category-specific, and it comes from a different number than the owned-domain share.
The category-by-category split
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The number that decides your allocation is not what share of your citations live on your own site. It is what share of your category's citations live on brand websites at all, versus what share live on marketplaces, forums, social, and editorial coverage. This is the source-type mix, and it moves a lot.
| Category | Brand websites | Marketplaces | Forums | Social | Where the citation lives |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conversational AI Platforms | 78% | 0% | 2% | 18% | On brand websites |
| HR & Payroll | 71% | 0% | 0% | 19% | On brand websites |
| CRM & Sales | 69% | 0% | 9% | 12% | On brand websites |
| Pet Care | 43% | 36% | 11% | 8% | Split, brand-site-leaning |
| Travel & Luggage | 42% | 32% | 15% | 11% | Split, brand-site-leaning |
| Health & Wellness | 36% | 34% | 8% | 12% | Split, close to even |
| Skincare & Beauty | 35% | 33% | 8% | 20% | Split, close to even |
| Baby Care | 24% | 52% | 9% | 10% | On marketplaces |
| Personal Grooming | 21% | 57% | 11% | 11% | On marketplaces |
| Audio & Wearables | 20% | 45% | 21% | 9% | On marketplaces + forums |
Read the table top to bottom. Three categories (Conversational AI, HR and Payroll, CRM and Sales) live at 69% or higher brand-site share. Three categories (Personal Grooming, Baby Care, Audio and Wearables) sit at 45% or higher marketplace share. Four categories (Pet Care, Travel and Luggage, Health and Wellness, Skincare and Beauty) are split closer to the middle, brand-site slightly ahead.
The number in your row is the number that decides your on-site vs off-site budget. Not the 4.1% overall.
The on-site half
In the categories where brand websites carry the majority of citations, on-site work is the primary lever. Engines are reading yellow.ai, zoho.com, and salesforce.com directly and using those pages as the answer. Yellow.ai leads Conversational AI with 49 citations and shows up in 45% of ChatGPT answers for the category, on a brand-site strategy. Their case study on this site reads what the on-site foundation looks like at 76 out of 100 on the Cited GEO Score, versus 48 for Haptik. The delta is JSON-LD schema across Article, BlogPosting, and Person, clean H2 and H3 headings, and content that reads as a definition instead of a slogan.
For these categories, the five on-site mistakes playbook is the shortest path to a citation-rate lift: missing author attribution, thin entity content on brand and product pages, missing FAQPage schema on real Q&A, tag proliferation without pillar structure, and missing content freshness. Each fix takes an afternoon. Each moves the on-site signals engines use to decide whether to lift your page as the answer.
If your category is in the top three of the table above, the on-site half is not the small lever. It is the main lever. You still need off-site work for the long tail, and Yellow.ai's Perplexity share at 13.8% is the reminder that even a category leader's on-site foundation does not close every engine (Perplexity leans on Gartner and G2 for enterprise SaaS, an off-site problem). But allocation for these categories starts on-site.
The off-site half
In the categories where marketplaces and forums carry the majority of citations, on-site work is not the primary lever. It is the hygiene layer. Personal Grooming citations live 57% on marketplaces (Amazon, Nykaa) and only 21% on brand websites. Baby Care citations live 52% on marketplaces. Audio and Wearables citations live 45% on marketplaces plus another 21% on forums (Reddit, category-specific communities).
For these categories, the on-site playbook is table stakes: fix the schema, add author attribution, ship FAQPage, keep the content fresh. But the AEO and GEO investment that moves the citation rate is off-site. Beardo, the number-one brand in Personal Grooming, is being cited from Amazon SKUs, Nykaa listings, Reddit grooming threads, and YouTube reviewer content. Their brand-site owned-share is a small share of a small share. Beardo's playbook is marketplace concentration and creator seeding, not JSON-LD.
The off-site work by surface, from the same B7 data plus the 4.1% article:
- Marketplaces (Amazon, Nykaa). Listing quality, A+ content, price-and-review velocity, correct category tags. This is the single biggest lever in marketplace-dominated categories.
- YouTube. Not owning a channel. Getting covered by reviewer channels your category buys from. Product-seeding, spec sheets sent to creators, sponsored comparison content.
- Reddit and category forums. Real subreddit presence (r/IndianSkincareAddicts, r/malegroomingIndia, r/BabyBumpsIndia, and category-specific communities). Real answers on real questions. No promotional posts.
- LinkedIn (for B2B). Long-form posts, data, LinkedIn Newsletter presence. AI engines now cite LinkedIn content in professional queries more than they cite LinkedIn profiles.
- Analyst reports and G2 (for B2B enterprise). Gartner Magic Quadrant coverage, G2 reviews at scale, Forrester and IDC quotes. This is what lifts Perplexity share in enterprise SaaS categories.
- Editorial coverage. Real publications your buyer reads (Inc42, YourStory, LBB, MoneyControl, category-specific verticals). Not sponsored listicles.
Each of these is a months-to-quarters build. That is why the allocation call matters. You cannot spend the first two quarters of a fiscal on the wrong side of your category's split.
The allocation call
Line up your category against the table and pick your split.
- Conversational AI, HR and Payroll, CRM and Sales. Put 60-70% of the AEO and GEO budget on on-site work first. Ship the Yellow.ai foundation (JSON-LD, Author schema, extractable H2 or H3 content). Then put 30-40% on the off-site pieces that lift Perplexity share and analyst coverage.
- Personal Grooming, Baby Care, Audio and Wearables. Put 70-80% of the budget on off-site work. Marketplace listing depth first, then YouTube reviewer seeding, then Reddit and category forums. Keep on-site at hygiene level (schema, author, FAQPage, freshness) but do not over-invest.
- Pet Care, Travel and Luggage, Skincare and Beauty, Health and Wellness. Put roughly 40-60% off-site with on-site at 40-50%. These categories reward both surfaces. Marketplace and YouTube coverage still matter. Brand-site content depth matters too because 35-43% of citations do land there.
If your category is not in the ten covered by the June 2026 Cited Index, you still need to run the source-mix diagnostic before you commit budget. Which lands us at the action.
One thing a marketing lead can do this week
Take five prompts a real buyer in your category would type. Run each of them against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Copy the citation URLs out. Group them by source type: brand websites (yours or a competitor's), marketplaces (Amazon, Nykaa, Flipkart), forums (Reddit, Quora), social (YouTube, LinkedIn), editorial (publications), and research (analyst reports). Divide each group's count by the total. That is your category's real source-type mix, and it is the number that decides where your next hour of AEO and GEO work should go.
If your split looks like Conversational AI, ship the five on-site mistakes playbook this week. If your split looks like Personal Grooming, put the hour into a marketplace and YouTube plan instead. The overall 4.1% number is the reason to run the diagnostic. Your category's number is the reason you can stop guessing and start allocating.
To see the source-type mix live for your category and to track how it moves as you invest, the Cited dashboard free tier opens the same 10-category view we used to write this piece. Your brand sits inside one of those leaderboards already.