Generative AI models love to cite Reuters and Axios, study finds

Journalistic content is integral to answers from generative AI tools, a new report from Generative Pulse by Muck Rack finds.

The authors of the report, published this week, analyzed more than one million citations output by generative AI models. Journalistic content was cited more than 27% of the time across all Muck Rack’s tests, and when it came to queries that implied “a level of recency” (including not just breaking news but timely responses to prompts like “car rental shortages in the U.S.” or “latest advancements in outpatient treatment methods for substance abuse”) that number jumped to 49%, or nearly half of all the links cited.

Muck Rack’s tests were conducted this month and included GPT’s 4o and 4o Mini models, Gemini’s Flash and Pro models, and Claude’s Sonnet and Haiku models.

When ChatGPT and similar generative AI products craft responses, they can only rely on training data up to a point. Muck Rack’s tests confirmed that if you disable citations — and subsequently, the ability to scrape the web in real-time — for these models, they often output inaccurate or out-of-date information.

Muck Rack also found that the type of question asked changed the citation sources significantly. Subjective questions, such as queries asking for advice or step-by-step instructions, pulled far more from “corporate blogs and content.” Muck Rack also broke down queries by industry, including healthcare, energy, and retail. For the media/entertainment, finance/insurance, and government industries, journalistic content was more likely to be cited than in other industries. That is in comparison to corporate blogs, paid media, academic articles, press releases, and other categories.

The quality of citations in generative AI products have been a constant point of contention between AI developers and news publishers — particularly as generative AI tools take a slice out of traditional search traffic. ChatGPT and similar products have been found to hallucinate URLs to news publisher sites, even those with OpenAI licensing deals. They have also been found to link out to syndications and unauthorized copies of articles instead of the original stories. The frequency of journalistic citations, by the numbers, has been far less documented.