Audit of 160,860 citations: nearly 40% of links shown by Chinese AI search go unused
Sanbi_Ai · reddit · 2026-10-17
A large-scale study (arXiv:2607.15771) audited 160,860 citations across DeepSeek, Qwen, Doubao and Tencent Yuanbao, running 614 questions three times on web and mobile. Findings: 39.3% of displayed source links are never used in the answer; only 8.3% of 632,256 brand mentions in cited pages survive into answers while 13.02% of recommended names appear in no cited page at all; cross-site repetition beats traditional domain authority (ranked 10th of 11 factors); and web vs mobile versions barely share URLs — Qwen had zero overlap on 64.2% of identical questions.
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