AI Answers in Four Industries: Where ChatGPT and Google Get Their Sources

The pattern from our software teardowns holds outside software. Google's AI Overviews lean on the sites Google already ranks: 50% of their source links came from domains in the organic top ten for the same search. ChatGPT's citations overlapped with that top ten far less, and with the Overview itself less still.

Read the columns as shares of source links (Overviews) and of cited sites (ChatGPT), counted once per answer.

Fintech: ChatGPT relied on personal finance publishers and regulators. NerdWallet was cited in 9 answers and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's consumerfinance.gov in 8.

Healthcare: ChatGPT spread its citations thinly and leaned on government sources: 17 of its 52 cited sites were .gov health sites or the UK's NHS. No single hospital or directory dominated.

Legal: the American Bar Association (americanbar.org) was ChatGPT's most-cited source, followed by legal directories and online legal services. Google's results and Overviews leaned on the same directories plus Reddit and Quora.

Ecommerce: ChatGPT cited product testing publishers (RTINGS, WIRED, Tom's Guide). Google's Overviews linked to Google's own product listings in 21 of 25 answers, so for product questions Google's shopping data is part of the answer itself.

Reddit ranked in Google's top ten for 68 of the 100 questions, and YouTube was linked in 55 of the 86 AI Overviews whose sources we could read. ChatGPT cited neither site in any of the 100 answers. That matches what we found on 700 software questions (Reddit, YouTube).

Questions: 25 per industry, written in the words a customer would use: "best" questions, how-to-choose questions and cost questions. Fintech covers consumer and small business money products, healthcare covers patients choosing care, legal covers people choosing a lawyer or legal service, ecommerce covers consumer product purchases. The full list is in the dataset.

Google: desktop results, United States, English, via the DataForSEO SERP API, collected on September 26, 2026 (timestamps in the files are UTC). Some AI Overviews load after the page; for those 37 questions we re-ran the same search the same evening with the Overview loaded and took its sources and top ten from that run. For 7 questions the Overview did not appear in the re-run, so their sources are missing; they still count as "Overview shown".

ChatGPT: web search on, logged out, United States, English, one run per question, via the DataForSEO ChatGPT scraper, same evening. One healthcare question returned no answer on the first run and was run once more.

Limits: 25 questions per industry is a snapshot, not a census. One run, one country, desktop only. Local questions ("best divorce lawyer") were asked without a city, so results reflect national rather than local answers. Treat the figures as directions, not constants.

• queries.csv (100 questions)
• per-question.csv (Google top ten, Overview sources and ChatGPT cited domains for each question)
• chatgpt-citations.csv (every ChatGPT citation with its URL)

Released under CC BY 4.0. Industry pages: fintech, healthcare, law firms, ecommerce.

Every market draws on a different mix of sources. The Category Salience Brief maps yours across Google and the AI surfaces, with competitors side by side.