Study: AI engines cite competitor pages and GitHub lists most for LLM gateway queries

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A developer-focused experiment submitted 27 realistic questions about LLM gateways to four AI search engines on September 20, 2026, analyzing 613 citation entries across all responses. The study found that the top cited domains included GitHub repositories, dev.to tutorials, and competitor product pages such as openrouter.ai and llmgateway.io. Despite widespread claims that Reddit appears in roughly 40% of AI answers, only 3 of the 613 citations — just 0.5% — pointed to Reddit threads. The research was conducted by the team behind FreeModel, a competing LLM gateway product that itself received zero citations across all 27 answers. The authors published the raw methodology and citation distribution rather than drawing firm conclusions, noting that 81% of citations were spread across 336 different domains with no dominant single source.

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