Research Experiment An AI Engine Cited a Hendricks Article the Firm Had Deleted. The Next Run Returned Zero Citations.
On 2026-08-18 and 2026-08-19 Hendricks pointed its own measurement instrument at its own brand. The second run sent 17 buyer questions to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, produced 51 answer cells, and cited hendricks.ai in none of them.
The first run produced one citation, and it was real. Perplexity answered the longest and most specific question in that set with a hendricks.ai article published on 2025-11-25 and retired on 2026-08-17, the day before the run. On the day it was cited, the address returned HTTP 410 Gone.
Research experiment
This is a research experiment, not a case study.
Hendricks is both the firm running the measurement and the brand being measured. There is no client here, no intervention, and no outcome anyone can attribute to anything. What follows is a dated baseline of what three AI systems cited when they were asked the questions a buyer in this category types.
It is published under the standard Hendricks applies to client work. The query set, the instrument, the denominators, the failed cells, the cost, the limits, and one correction to this page are all on the page. A firm that will not publish its own zero, or its own mistake, has no standing to report anybody else’s number.
The finding
Hendricks measured its own citation presence twice. On 2026-08-19, across 17 buyer questions and 51 answer cells, hendricks.ai was cited zero times. On 2026-08-18, across 15 questions and 45 cells, it was cited once: Perplexity answered the longest and most specific question in that set with a hendricks.ai article published on 2025-11-25 and retired on 2026-08-17, the day before the run. The citation was real, the page was gone, and the address returned HTTP 410 Gone to anyone who followed it.
Executive Summary What the two runs found
Hendricks sells the measurement of whether a brand is present in AI-mediated answers. Run against its own brand on 2026-08-19, that measurement returns zero. Nineteen of the 51 cells in that run contained a citation of any kind, 248 distinct domains filled the 305 citation slots inside them, and hendricks.ai was not among those domains.
The run a day earlier found one citation, and it is the more instructive result. Perplexity answered "Consultant to connect AI search visibility to pipeline" with a hendricks.ai article titled "How Do I Connect AI Search Visibility With Measurable Pipeline and Revenue Impact?". The article was real and it answered the question asked. Hendricks published it on 2025-11-25 and deleted it on 2026-08-17 while replacing the site, and the engine cited it on 2026-08-18, the day after it came down. The address returned HTTP 410 Gone. The citation outlived the article, and the firm that earned it had already thrown the asset away.
What both runs mean is narrow and worth stating precisely. On two dates, on one query set each, the systems Hendricks observes cited hendricks.ai once and then not at all. That is not a trend, because the two runs asked different questions. It does not mean the firm is invisible, because most of these answers cited nobody at all. And it does not mean anything is working or failing, because nothing was changed between the runs and nothing was held back for comparison.
Three of the findings here are not about Hendricks at all. Most of these answers carry no sources. The three engines behave so differently that a single AI visibility score averaged across them describes nothing that exists. And where citation does happen it is spread across hundreds of domains, most of them cited exactly once.
Key Findings Five findings from two runs
- 01
An engine cited a Hendricks article after the firm had deleted it.
Run 1, on 2026-08-18, produced one citation of hendricks.ai. Perplexity answered "Consultant to connect AI search visibility to pipeline", the longest and most specific question in that set, with a hendricks.ai article titled "How Do I Connect AI Search Visibility With Measurable Pipeline and Revenue Impact?". Hendricks published that article on 2025-11-25 and deleted it on 2026-08-17 while replacing the site. The citation arrived on 2026-08-18, the day after the deletion, and the address returned HTTP 410 Gone. Run 2, a day later on a different set of questions, cited hendricks.ai in none of its 51 cells. The engine kept the citation. The firm had not kept the page. Any buyer that citation could have sent arrived at a tombstone.
- 02
Most answers cited nothing at all.
Nineteen of the 51 cells in the 2026-08-19 run contained a citation. Thirty-two were answered with no source attached. The competitive frame this category sells, in which brands contest slots inside AI answers, does not describe most of these answers, because most of them had no slot to contest. The number that matters for whether a brand could have been cited is 19, not 51.
- 03
The three engines behaved so differently that averaging them describes nothing.
On 2026-08-19, Perplexity cited sources in 17 of 17 cells. ChatGPT cited sources in 2 of 17 and answered the rest from its own knowledge with nothing attached. Google AI Overviews returned no sourced overview on any of the 17. A single AI visibility score averaged across those three describes no system that exists. If a report hands you one number, ask which of the three produced it and what the other two did.
- 04
Where citation happened, it was extremely fragmented.
The 2026-08-19 run cited 248 distinct domains across 305 citation slots, and 218 of those domains, 88 percent, were cited exactly once. The run a day earlier cited 254 distinct domains across 324 slots, 221 of them once, 87 percent. Community and professional-network domains supplied the most repeated sources in both runs: reddit.com and linkedin.com sat ahead of every other domain cited, on both dates.
- 05
The answers contained two checkable errors.
Two defects in these two runs can be reproduced by anyone. A recommended vendor domain with no DNS record, and a question from an agency principal answered with consumer software help articles. Each is reported below with the method used to verify it and the date it was verified.
Definitions The eight terms every number here depends on
Read these before the tables. The difference between a cell that failed, a cell that cited nothing, and a cell that cited somebody else is the difference between three unrelated states that a single visibility percentage would flatten into one.
- Engine
- One AI answer system a run sends questions to. Three are covered here: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. The scope statement under Limitations records what that set does and does not include.
- Query set
- The fixed list of buyer questions a run sends to every engine. Run 1 used 15 questions. Run 2 used 17, supplied by Brandon Lincoln Hendricks from his own knowledge of the market and structured by buyer stage. The second set replaced the first rather than extending it.
- Cell
- One question sent to one engine on one date. Seventeen questions across three engines produce 51 cells.
- Measured cell
- A cell where the engine returned an answer the probe could read. A cell that errored is not a measurement of anything and is counted separately.
- Populated cell
- A measured cell in which the engine cited at least one source. A cell that cited nothing cannot cite anybody, so the populated count, not the cell count, is the denominator for whether a brand could have been cited.
- Owned citation
- A cell in which the engine cited a URL whose host is hendricks.ai. A brand name appearing in answer text without a cited URL is a weaker signal and is not counted here. Whether the URL still resolves is a separate question from whether it was cited, and this page reports both.
- Citation slot
- One cited URL in one cell. A domain cited in six cells fills six slots, so the slot count is always at least the distinct-domain count.
- Distinct domain
- The number of different hosts appearing across all citation slots in a run. Read against the slot count it is the fragmentation measure: the closer the two numbers sit, the less any domain repeats.
The Data Both runs, in full
Two runs, reported side by side rather than combined. The query set changed between them, so the columns sit next to each other as two separate measurements and never as a series.
| Measure | Run 1, 2026-08-18 | Run 2, 2026-08-19 |
|---|---|---|
| Questions in the set | 15 | 17 |
| Cells run | 45 | 51 |
| Cells measured | 39 | 51 |
| Cells that errored | 6 | 0 |
| Cells citing at least one source | 21 | 19 |
| Measured cells citing nothing | 18 | 32 |
| Cells citing hendricks.ai | 1 | 0 |
| Distinct domains cited | 254 | 248 |
| Citation slots filled | 324 | 305 |
| Domains cited exactly once | 221, or 87 percent | 218, or 88 percent |
| API spend for the run | $0.47 | $0.39 |
| Engine | Cells citing a source, run 1 | Cells citing a source, run 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 15 of 15 | 17 of 17 |
| ChatGPT | 4 of 15 | 2 of 17 |
| Google AI Overviews | 2 of 9 successful probes | 0 of 17 |
| Domain | Cells citing it |
|---|---|
| reddit.com | 11 |
| linkedin.com | 11 |
| semrush.com | 6 |
| medium.com | 4 |
| searchengineland.com | 4 |
| ahrefs.com | 4 |
| Domain | Cells citing it |
|---|---|
| reddit.com | 14 |
| linkedin.com | 10 |
| semrush.com | 6 |
| maxaeo.ai | 4 |
| amicited.com | 3 |
| llmreach.ai | 2 |
The domain tables record which sources these answers cited. They are facts about the answers and nothing else. They are not a ranking of firms, they carry no judgment about any company behind a domain, and no page on this site publishes one.
Run 1 errored on 6 of its 45 cells, all of them Google AI Overviews, all returning DataForSEO task error 40101. That is why the Google AI Overviews figure for run 1 reads against 9 successful probes rather than 15. Run 2 errored on nothing.
The single cell citing hendricks.ai in run 1 cites a page Hendricks published on 2025-11-25 and retired on 2026-08-17. The citation is counted here because it happened. The page it points at is gone, which is a separate fact and is reported next to it rather than folded into the count. Key finding 01 and the corrections section carry the detail.
Answer Reliability Two checkable errors in these answers
Each was found in the run output and then verified independently of the probe, by hand, on the date stated.
- 01
A recommended vendor domain with no DNS record.
Run 1, ChatGPT, answering "Who can audit our brand visibility in AI assistants", listed viaudit.com among its sources. Twelve vendor domains were checked with dig and curl on 2026-08-18. Eleven resolved and returned HTTP 200. viaudit.com returned no DNS record and no response. A domain with no DNS record is not a company, so this is a checkable statement about an answer rather than a judgment about a business, and any reader can reproduce it in one command.
- 02
A professional question answered as a consumer question.
Run 2, Perplexity, answering "what do I tell my client when they ask why they’re not in ChatGPT", cited help.openai.com, wikihow.com, youtube.com, ct.nl, setapp.com and pcguide.com. Those are consumer software help resources. The question is an agency principal asking how to handle a conversation with a client. The engine answered a consumer asking how to operate ChatGPT.
Two errors in two runs is not a rate and is not published as one. Two runs cannot establish how often these systems get something wrong, and this page makes no claim about that.
What the two do establish is narrower and still useful. An answer that names a source is not the same as an answer that is right, and a brand cannot assume that being absent from an answer is worse than being present in it incorrectly.
A third defect was reported in this section when the page was first published, and it was Hendricks that had made the error rather than the engine. The correction is below.
Methodology How these numbers were produced
The instrument is a first-party probe that calls the DataForSEO AI Optimization API, one question at a time, per engine, and records the URLs each engine cited. It is the same instrument Hendricks points at a client engagement. Nothing about either run was built for this page.
- 01
Fix the query set before the run.
Run 1 used 15 questions inferred from a buyer prompt inventory. Run 2 replaced them with 17 supplied by Brandon Lincoln Hendricks from his own knowledge of the market, structured by buyer stage. The set is fixed before the run and is not edited after the answers are read.
- 02
Send every question to every engine once.
Each question goes to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity on the run date. One question on one engine is one cell. No cell was run twice on the same date.
- 03
Record cited URLs, not brand mentions.
The counted field is the list of URLs an engine cited, matched on host. A brand named in answer text without a cited URL is a different and weaker signal, and counting it here would make the number larger and easier to move.
- 04
Keep the three answer states apart.
Every cell is measured and populated, measured and empty, or errored. Folding an errored cell into an empty one turns a broken instrument into a finding, which is the failure this separation exists to prevent.
- 05
Report the run health next to the number.
Run 1 errored on 6 of 45 cells, all Google AI Overviews, all DataForSEO task error 40101. Run 2 errored on none. A run that fails and a run that finds nothing produce similar-looking output files and mean opposite things, so the error count travels with every figure taken from either run.
- 06
Resolve every cited URL, and verify anything unexpected outside the probe.
A citation count says a URL was named. It does not say the URL still works. Resolving the one hendricks.ai address cited in run 1 is what turned a citation into the most useful finding on this page, because the address returned HTTP 410 Gone. The two answer errors were then each checked by hand: the unresolved vendor domain with dig and curl, the misrouted answer by reading the cited pages. Dates are on each finding.
- 07
Verify a claim about a Hendricks page against the Hendricks page.
This step exists because the first published version of this page failed it. Hendricks ran the history check for the cited article against the wrong repository, found nothing, and published the conclusion that the engine had invented the URL. The article was in the other retired site. A verification that names no specific repository, branch, and command is not a verification, and the corrections section below records what was published, what was wrong, and what changed.
Run 1 cost $0.47 in API spend. Run 2 cost $0.39. Those figures are published deliberately, because they are the strongest evidence available that this design is reproducible. Anyone with an API key and a list of questions can run this design against their own brand and does not have to take this page’s word for anything.
The instrument is named for the same reason. Naming it is disclosure, not endorsement. A reader who wants to check this work needs to know what produced the data.
Sample and Date Range What was sampled, and when
- Subject: hendricks.ai, the firm publishing this page. No client brand and no client data appears in either run.
- Dates: two runs, 2026-08-18 and 2026-08-19. One run per cell, one cell per question per engine.
- Engines: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
- Questions: 15 in run 1, 17 in run 2. The second set replaced the first and does not extend it.
- Cells: 45 in run 1, of which 39 were measured and 6 errored. 51 in run 2, all 51 measured.
- Geography and language: one setting, held constant across both runs.
- Instrument: a first-party probe calling the DataForSEO AI Optimization API.
- Resolution check: the one cited hendricks.ai address was fetched by hand on 2026-08-18 and returned HTTP 410 Gone.
Assumptions Four things this run assumes
- 01
That the query set represents what a buyer actually types.
Run 2 was built from market knowledge rather than from a keyword tool or a positioning document, which is the strongest basis available and is still a judgment. If the set is wrong, the run measures the wrong questions accurately, and every figure on this page inherits that.
- 02
That an API response resembles what a person sees.
These answers were retrieved through an API, not by a person in a browser with an account, a location, and a history. Hendricks assumes the API surface is close enough to be informative. It does not assume the two are identical, and no figure here should be read as what a specific buyer saw.
- 03
That a cited URL is the right unit to count.
The count is cited URLs whose host is hendricks.ai. A brand named in answer text without a link is not counted. That choice makes the number smaller and harder to move, and it is the reason run 2 reports zero rather than something more forgiving.
- 04
That one run per cell describes a day and not a position.
No cell was repeated within a date, so nothing here measures how much these answers churn between identical runs. Two days is what was sampled and two days is what is claimed.
Limitations What these two runs do not show
Limitation
This is a baseline. It is not an experiment in the sense that would let anyone claim a cause, and the difference is not a technicality. Two runs a day apart, one variable changed between them, no control group, and no intervention. Nothing here tests whether any tactic produces a citation.
- 01
The two runs are not a before and after.
The query set changed between them. Run 1 asked 15 questions and run 2 asked a different 17. Any sentence that compares the two as a trend is wrong, including one that reads the move from one citation to zero as a decline. The two runs asked different questions, so there is no comparable pair on this page.
- 02
Deleting the article is not shown to have caused anything.
Hendricks published the cited article on 2025-11-25 and deleted it on 2026-08-17, and an engine cited it on 2026-08-18. Those are three records and they are all this page claims. Nothing here shows that the deletion changed what any engine cited afterwards, because the second run asked different questions and no comparison was designed. A reader who wants the causal version of this question needs a repeated set across the change, and no such series exists.
- 03
There is no control and no intervention.
Hendricks changed nothing about the site between the two runs and held nothing back for comparison. The design cannot attribute any outcome to any action, and no later result may be attributed backwards to this baseline either.
- 04
The result does not generalise past these conditions.
These questions, these engines, these two dates, one geography, one language setting. A different set of questions on the same day would return different domains, and the change of set between the two runs is a direct demonstration of exactly that.
- 05
Nobody outside the platforms can observe why a source was chosen.
This page reports what appeared. It offers no account of why any engine chose any source, because no such account is available to anyone outside the companies operating these systems. A firm that offers one is guessing, and this page will not.
- 06
A cell that cited nothing is not a cell Hendricks lost.
Thirty-two of the 51 cells in run 2 carried no source at all. The denominator for whether Hendricks could have been cited is 19, not 51. Counting all 51 as losses would overstate the competitive problem and hide the more interesting fact underneath it, which is that most of this map is unclaimed rather than taken.
- 07
This is not yet a full Selection Intelligence baseline.
It measures citation presence. It does not report Observed Consideration Rate, Observed Recommendation Rate, Selection Stability, or Commercial Selection Gap. Selection Stability in particular is a measure across repeated runs of an unchanged set, and no such series exists yet, because these two runs used two different sets.
- 08
The measurement covers one slice of AI-mediated search.
Hendricks observes three systems: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Hendricks does not measure, test, monitor, or report on Google AI Mode, Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot. A baseline on the observed set says nothing about the surfaces outside it, and nothing on this page should be read as a statement about them.
Publication record
- Author
- Brandon Lincoln Hendricks, Search Intelligence Engineer, Hendricks
- Study type
- Research experiment
- Claim class
- Observation
- Category
- AI-Mediated Search
- Published
- Last updated
- Data through
- Related solution
- Selection Intelligence
- Corrections
- Read the corrections policy
The updated date on this page moves when a figure, a method, or a limitation changes. It is not refreshed to signal activity. It moved once already on the day of publication, for the correction recorded below. The data-through date is the last run this page reports and will not advance until a further run is published here.
Corrections A correction to this page, and how the next one gets made
Correction, 2026-08-19, the day this page was published. The first version said the single hendricks.ai citation in the 2026-08-18 run pointed at a page that had never existed, and it counted both runs as zero on that basis. That was wrong. The page was real. Hendricks published it on 2025-11-25, retired it on 2026-08-17 while replacing the site, and Perplexity cited it on 2026-08-18, the day after it came down. Run 1 records one real citation of a retired page. Run 2 records zero and is unchanged.
Hendricks caused the error by running the check against the wrong repository. The firm has two retired sites. The check searched the one with 74 registered insight slugs and a different directory layout, did not find the address there, and stopped. The address was in the other one, which is the retired site belonging to this codebase. One command against the correct site returns the opposite answer. The same published sentence also claimed the address appeared in no list of retired addresses, and it was in that list in this site’s own source at the time.
Every other figure in the study is unchanged, and each was verified against the run records again. The full entry, with what was published and what changed, is in the corrections log rather than only here.
If a figure here is wrong, or a third party runs this design and gets a materially different result, the correction is published with its date, the original figure, the contradicting result, and what changed. Nothing on this page is quietly edited.
That path exists because a firm selling measurement discipline has to be correctable in public. Needing it on the first day is not the demonstration anyone would choose. Publishing it anyway is the whole argument for having it.
Related Solution Where this measurement sits in the work
The unit counted here, whether an engine cited a source and which one, is one input to Selection Intelligence, which reports whether a brand entered consideration rather than whether a URL appeared. The two are not the same question, and this page answers only the narrower one.
The run design behind a client baseline, the context panels, the classification rule, and the evidence grade every conclusion carries are on the Methodology page.
Keep Reading Where to go next.
- Selection IntelligenceWhat a consideration and recommendation baseline covers, produces, and reports.
- What Is Selection Intelligence?The measures a baseline reports, defined before any of them is reported.
- MethodologyContext panels, classification, weighting, evidence grades, and the stated limits.
- What Is AI-Mediated Search?The surfaces this run sampled, and which of them Hendricks observes.
- Do You Need an AI Visibility Tool or a Partner?What a monitoring subscription produces, and which jobs it leaves to a person.
Sources and updates
This page reports first-party measurement produced by Hendricks. Every figure on it comes from one of two probe runs, on 2026-08-18 and 2026-08-19, each recorded with its denominators, its error count, and its cost. It reports no third-party research, no vendor study, and no statistic from anyone else, and therefore cites none. Updated 2026-08-19, the day of publication: the first version reported the single hendricks.ai citation in the 2026-08-18 run as pointing at a page that had never existed. The page was real and had been retired on 2026-08-17. Run 1 now reports one real citation, run 2 still reports zero, no other figure changed, and the full entry is in the corrections log. Last reviewed .
This measurement is applied in the Selection Intelligence solution, the Methodology and the Search Intelligence Diagnostic.