Summary
- Domains under DR60 — even under DR40 — earn significant AI citations, according to Stacker's research.
- Their performance varies by platform, with Claude as the most likely to cite lower-DR sites.
- Citations increase with pickup volume, up to a certain point, meaning that optimizing for reach is still a valuable strategy.
Here at Stacker, we've talked quite a bit about how having your content distributed to high-authority news sites contributes to AI visibility. For example, a study Stacker published in December 2025 found that earned media distribution can increase citations by up to 325%.
Our analysis has often looked at this in terms of domain rating, or DR. As a refresher, DR is a score that SEO analytics leader Ahrefs assigns to a domain to rate the quality of its backlinking profile, on a logarithmic scale that goes from 0-100. The simplest way to understand it is that the more links that point to your site, the higher your DR score. It matters for GEO not because LLMs look at DR when deciding what to cite (they don't), but because it reflects the same authority signals that AI engines tend to value.
But it turns out that your pickups don't have to be from the highest-DR sites to be valuable.
We looked at 895 stories that were distributed on the Stacker Newswire between May 6 and September 11, 2026.
Our analysis found that while DR61+ sites get cited at a higher rate across all of the platforms that we track, domains below that threshold still earn significant citations.
This indicates that AI platforms are pulling from a wider swath of the web than brands may assume — an important consideration if they're chasing only top-tier placements. Having a mix of DRs (both high and low) in your pickups is beneficial to building AI visibility.
Methodology
The analysis covered 895 stories that earned about 212,000 pickups across the Stacker network. We monitored the citations these stories earned in the four weeks after they were distributed, studying performance on six AI platforms: Claude, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.
We grouped domains into three tiers: sub-40, 41-60, and 61+.
The overall citation rate across all responses was 4.7% — in other words, 4.7% of all of the AI responses we collected contained a citation to a brand story on the Stacker network.
While DR61+ sites were cited more frequently, domains with a DR under 40 still accounted for one-fifth of the Stacker network citations.
Citation patterns diverge by platform
The performance for each band varied by platform. Claude cited lower-DR sites at the highest rate, with 1.8% of its responses going to sub-40 sites and 2.6% going to DR41-60 sites. AI Overviews was close behind.
On the other hand, we found that ChatGPT hardly ever cites domains under DR61; only 0.05% of its responses cited a pickup from a sub-40 site, and only 0.04% of responses cited DR41-60 domains. We've seen in our past analyses that ChatGPT is the hardest AI platform to crack — but the brands that do break through get the benefit of being in front of the largest pool of active AI users.
Overall, there was a positive correlation between pickups and citations, meaning that getting more pickups, even on lower- or mid-DR sites, improved citation rates. However, this benefit tended to plateau at around 90 pickups for domains with a DR under 40. We saw a similar plateau effect for other DR tiers as well, though citations to those domains tended to peak higher.
What does this mean for content teams?
Here's how content teams should think about these findings practically:
- Chasing only DR61+ pickups may mean leaving citations on the table. Our research found that domains that fall below that threshold are still earning citations, especially on Claude and AI Overviews.
- Pickup volume and quality both matter. Since we saw that having more pickups led to more citations (up to the plateau), optimizing for reach still makes sense, even if the pickups are on lower- or mid-DR sites. If you're not earning the most pickups on high-DR sites, you can still use the lower-DR buckets to their maximum potential.
- Set expectations according to the platform you're optimizing for. If ChatGPT is the top priority of your AI visibility program, then earning pickups on DR61+ sites is going to be more important. But if your goal is to improve your visibility across AI platforms, then having a diversified mix in your pickups is likely to pay off.
When it comes to earning AI citations through content distribution, DR still matters, but it's not the end-all-be-all that it often gets treated as.
Madeline Stone is the Content Manager for Editorial & Insights at Stacker. She was previously a longtime business and tech journalist at Business Insider and a content and communications consultant for startups.
