The effect holds everywhere
Stacker Network Partners outlast non-network domains on every major AI platform, from Google's AI products to ChatGPT and Perplexity. This is structurally sound across each of the models we queried.
Key Finding
OpenAI (ChatGPT) churns through sources fastest: a 3.4-week baseline half-life means non-network domain content is largely gone after two months. Stacker Network Partners on OpenAI last 2.4× longer, making the penalty for not having durable placement steepest on the world's most popular AI assistant.
Consistent advantage across verticals
Every industry in the study shows meaningful gains in citation persistence for Stacker Network Partners. The effect ranges from +2.6 weeks in Tech & SaaS to +6.4 weeks in Real Estate.
📐 Methodology & Definitions
Source Decay Half-Life
The number of weeks until a source domain's persistence in AI-generated citations falls by half. Modeled from week-level retention curves across a 26-week observation window.
Measurement Approach
Prompt topics mapped to Stacker industries, then source persistence estimated at the cell level: stacker industry × assistant × partner status. Smoothed with bootstrap-style resampling and reliability adjustment.
Post-Stratification
Outputs are post-stratified so published numbers reflect expected source persistence in the live citation mix, rather than raw repeat rates from a narrower slice of prompts.
Important Caveats
These are model-driven persistence estimates. Stacker network coverage is still relatively small, so network estimates are strongest at rolled-up levels and weaker in the deepest assistant/industry cuts. This is ongoing research.
Visibility that compounds
Citation durability is not a fixed trait of your content. It is a function of where and how that content is distributed.
Distribution is durability
Content published once on a single domain has a ~4.5-week citation window. The same content distributed through the Stacker publisher network persists for nearly 10 weeks on average. The difference is not the content itself but the breadth and authority of the sources carrying it. Distribution creates redundancy, and redundancy creates staying power in AI systems.
Measurement changes the game
Most brands have no visibility into how long their content persists in AI-generated answers. Through Stacker's partnership with Scrunch, brands in the network get access to ongoing citation durability data across platforms and industries. This turns AI visibility from a guessing game into a measurable, improvable channel.