What did you think of that Holiday Inn from your last trip? Did that burger joint season their fries well? It’s not just future travelers and hungry foodies reading what you have to say on Tripadvisor or Yelp. Large language models (LLM) want to know what you experienced, too.
We looked at 47 major domains for user reviews, sites like Trustpilot, G2, Gartner, Apple’s App Store, Google’s reviews and more. Every LLM we reviewed referenced dozens of them.
Perplexity cited them the most, with the domains combining for a 2.2% share of the model’s citations. Though not an enormous share, that share is deceptively significant, given that models cite thousands of URLs in any meaningful sample of responses for any given topic. The highest share Perplexity gives to any one domain is 4.7%.
User Reviews Increasingly Cited on Several Models
ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity are increasingly mentioning these user review sites, although Google AI Mode is shifting away from them, based on the 7-day rolling average source share of these sites through April, May and June. It is not surprising to see a big change in a Google LLM’s behavior, given how many things the company has changed in recent months.
The Topics Where Reviews Matter Most
Of 86 product categories we reviewed, B2B services, travel and software topics led the pack.
“Auditing services” was the most user-review-reliant topic for Perplexity and Copilot, with 34% and 27% source shares respectively. “Budget hotels” led on Google AI Mode and ChatGPT with 12% and 10% source shares. “Intrusion detection systems” was the leader on Gemini with a 10% source share.
No Domain Dominates User Review Citations
Each model pulls from different domains to different degrees based on their training, publishers’ bot access permissions and other factors.
Gartner was the most cited user review domain of the 47 we reviewed on both ChatGPT and Gemini. Google AI Mode referred to Google reviews more than any other review site, while ConsumerAffairs was No. 1 for Copilot and Clutch was No. 1 for Perplexity.
| User Review Domains | All Domains | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Most-Cited Domain | Source Share | Rank – All Domains | Most-Cited Domain | Source Share |
| ChatGPT | Gartner.com | 0.2% | 59 | Forbes.com | 5.3% |
| Copilot | Consumeraffairs.com | 0.3% | 52 | Forbes.com | 3.1% |
| Gemini | Gartner.com | 0.1% | 132 | Bankrate.com | 3.3% |
| Google AI Mode | Google.com | 0.3% | 25 | YouTube.com | 3.5% |
| Perplexity | Clutch.co | 0.5% | 24 | YouTube.com | 4.7% |
Methodology
At Evertune Research, we track hundreds of brands across 250 categories. For this analysis, we ran more than 5,000 unique prompts across 86 product categories, repeating each multiple times daily from April 1 to June 25. In total, we ran about 6.5 million prompts across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity.
Evertune is the AI marketing platform for brands that want to own the AI customer journey. Evertune analyzes prompt responses at scale across all major LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews and more, to deliver statistically significant visibility data, then closes the loop with tools to act on it: website optimization, data-driven content creation, most influential sources, and paid activation through affiliate and programmatic AI retargeting partners. Where most tools tell you where you stand, Evertune tells you what to do about it. Founded by early executives of The Trade Desk and backed by $20M from leading investors.
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