Do AI engines cite homepages? In 1,147 cited URLs, 92.6% pointed at deep pages — and Claude cited zero homepages at all

Method, stated before the numbers

Same corpus as the rest of the citation-economy series: 12 pinned buyer questions × 4 engines × 3 samples each = 144 answers in one run (2026-08-03), citations read from each engine's returned citation payload. The cut is mechanical: parse every cited URL and classify its path — homepage (empty path, e.g. `vendor.com/`) or deep page (anything below it). One exclusion, stated up front: Gemini returns bare domains in its citation payload — 440 entries with no path at all — so it cannot enter a path cut in either direction. That leaves the three URL-returning engines: ChatGPT (252 URLs), Perplexity (717) and Claude (178) — 1,147 full URLs across 348 distinct domains.

The split: three engines, one direction

The deep pages are not scattered randomly through sites either: 52.7% of the 1,147 URLs sit in a recognizable content section (`/blog`, `/learn`, `/guide`, `/resources`, `/articles`, `/insights`, `/news`), and 34.0% have listicle-shaped slugs (containing “best”, “top-N”, “tools” or “-vs-”). And Perplexity's 17 homepage citations are not a diverse set: they cover seven domains, every one an AI-visibility tool vendor (aifindmybusiness.com, getvisibai.com, aivisitaudit.com, aiclicks.io, visibleiq.ai, trackmybusiness.ai, ailocaltool.com).

The ChatGPT exception is really a question-type effect

ChatGPT's 27% average hides a clean split: when the question asks which tool exists, it cites vendor front doors — 74–77% homepages on the two pure tool-discovery questions. When the question asks how to do something, its homepage rate collapses to zero and it cites articles like the other engines. The homepage citations are not “homepages beat content” — they are ChatGPT naming products, where the product's address happens to be its homepage.

What this means if you care about AI visibility

• Your homepage is almost never the citable artifact. On advice-shaped and how-to buyer questions — most of what a small business's customers actually ask — all three URL-returning engines cited deep pages essentially 100% of the time. The unit of AI visibility is a specific page that answers a specific question, and it usually lives in a content section.
• The homepage path only pays if you ARE the answer. The homepages that earned citations were tool vendors being named on tool-lookup questions. That is product-in-category visibility, not content strategy — you get it by being a nameable vendor in the category, not by rewriting the front page.
• This is the same shape a 25,000-citation agency study found from the other side. DeltaV's 90-day study measured citation “fingerprints” by industry — listicles 61% in B2B tech, homepages 55% in local services. Our panel is a B2B-ish tool category, and our first-party numbers land where their fingerprint predicts: deep listicle-and-article pages dominate, homepages only surface where the vendor itself is the answer.

Limits

• One run, one day, one panel. 12 buyer questions about AI visibility for small businesses, 2026-08-03, API citation payloads — consumer UIs can differ. The full URL list behind every number is dated and shared with anyone who asks.
• “Homepage” means an empty URL path. A root URL with a query string counts as a homepage; `vendor.com/index.html` would count as deep. With 85 homepage rows in 1,147, every classification is checkable in seconds.
• Gemini is excluded by its payload format, not by choice. 440 domain-only entries carry no path information — a limitation we've also written about from the tagging side.
• We have a commercial interest. We sell AI-visibility audits; discount our conclusions accordingly and read the counted rows.

The practical reading: if AI engines are citing anyone in your category, they are citing a deep page — a comparison, a how-to, a listicle — not a front door. Whether any of those cited pages are yours is checkable directly: run the four-engine, three-sample measurement on your business in 60 seconds.