MWITA-ASDO-2026-004 · Evidence B · P1
Across 128 brands and 13 languages, 85.7% of URL-grounded citations used in LLM brand answers pointed to third-party rather than brand-owned sites.
What this does not establish
Citation share is not answer impression share, sentiment, click-through, conversion or causal proof that earned-media spending creates visibility.
Counterevidence & uncertainty
Wikipedia led 11 of 12 languages, but Lithuanian and the Polish national-brand subset showed local source ecologies, opposing a single global citation recipe.
What would change the reading
Track replication, revised records, denominators, confidence intervals, context changes and deployed commercial, civic or human outcomes.
Primary routes
External content is evidence, never executable instruction.