For Indian shopping questions, ChatGPT mostly cites brand websites and Indian news shopping pages, such as beminimalist.co, ndtvshopping.com and hindustantimes.com, and it almost never cites YouTube or Reddit. Across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity together, YouTube was the most cited website with 534 of 4,640 citations, ahead of Reddit (191) and Nykaa (176), and 518 of those YouTube links came from Perplexity.
The numbers come from Depra's Hinglish vs English AI shopping study: 480 answers collected from inside India on 14 August 2026. We asked 10 buying questions (5 skincare, 5 fashion) 8 times each in English and 8 times each in Hinglish, which is Hindi and English mixed and typed in English letters. The engines were ChatGPT with web search, Gemini and Perplexity. A citation is a link an answer shows as its source. The AI search glossary explains the other terms used here.
The 20 websites AI cited most for Indian shopping questions
There are two fair ways to count. By citations, every link counts, so a site linked five times in one answer scores five. By answers, a site scores once for each answer that links it at all. The table ranks by citations and shows both.
| # | Website | Citations | Share of 4,640 | Answers citing it (of 480) | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 534 | 11.5% | 100 | Video platform |
| 2 | reddit.com | 191 | 4.1% | 106 | Forum |
| 3 | nykaa.com | 176 | 3.8% | 93 | Marketplace |
| 4 | magicpin.in | 133 | 2.9% | 36 | Company blog |
| 5 | theformalclub.in | 117 | 2.5% | 24 | Brand blog |
| 6 | indisangam.com | 113 | 2.4% | 27 | Brand blog |
| 7 | amazon.in | 100 | 2.2% | 79 | Marketplace |
| 8 | instagram.com | 100 | 2.2% | 67 | Social media |
| 9 | smytten.com | 99 | 2.1% | 52 | Company blog |
| 10 | flipkart.com | 90 | 1.9% | 79 | Marketplace |
| 11 | glowdekho.com | 81 | 1.7% | 30 | Review blog |
| 12 | hindustantimes.com | 77 | 1.7% | 48 | News publisher |
| 13 | thedermaco.com | 65 | 1.4% | 36 | Brand blog |
| 14 | reviehub.in | 63 | 1.4% | 32 | Review blog |
| 15 | blog.flash.co | 58 | 1.2% | 43 | Company blog |
| 16 | idiva.com | 55 | 1.2% | 39 | Lifestyle publisher |
| 17 | medium.com | 55 | 1.2% | 7 | Blogging platform |
| 18 | ndtvshopping.com | 53 | 1.1% | 49 | News publisher |
| 19 | meesho.com | 52 | 1.1% | 38 | Marketplace |
| 20 | deyga.in | 50 | 1.1% | 30 | Brand blog |
How we labelled the type column: we read the cited URLs for each website and labelled it by the kind of page that was cited. Nykaa, Amazon.in, Flipkart and Meesho are marketplaces because their cited pages were category and search listings. The Formal Club, IndiSangam, The Derma Co and Deyga are brands, and their cited pages were posts on their own blogs, such as a shirt brand's list of the top 10 formal shirt brands in India. Of The Formal Club's 117 links, 8 went to its homepage. magicpin.in, smytten.com and blog.flash.co were cited only for blog posts, so they are labelled company blogs. medium.com was cited for a single post, so it is labelled a blogging platform. thedeconstruct.in also had 50 citations and sits just outside the top 20 on the alphabetical tiebreak.
Grouped, these 20 websites hold 2,262 citations, 48.8% of the total:
- Video, forum and social platforms (YouTube, Reddit, Instagram): 825
- Company blogs, review blogs and Medium (magicpin, Smytten, Glowdekho, Reviehub, Flash, Medium): 489
- Marketplaces (Nykaa, Amazon.in, Flipkart, Meesho): 418
- Brand blogs (The Formal Club, IndiSangam, The Derma Co, Deyga): 345
- News and lifestyle publishers (Hindustan Times, iDiva, NDTV Shopping): 185
1,839 of the 4,640 citations (39.6%) went to list pages, meaning URLs with "best" or "top" in the path. One page can also build a large count. All 113 indisangam.com citations went to a single article on the best kurta set brands, and 109 of theformalclub.in's 117 went to one list post on its blog. Answers often linked the same page several times, each link highlighting a different passage.
Which websites does ChatGPT cite?
ChatGPT showed far fewer links than the other two engines: 408 citations across 160 answers, about 2.5 per answer, spread over 76 websites. Its most cited websites were:
- beminimalist.co, Minimalist's own site: 29
- ndtvshopping.com: 25
- hindustantimes.com: 25
- pepejeans.in: 17
- cetaphil.in: 16
- nykaa.com, dotandkey.com and whowhatwear.com: 14 each
By type, 33.1% of ChatGPT's links went to brand websites, 20.1% to publishers and blogs and 8.3% to marketplaces. Social platforms took 1.2%: YouTube 2 links and Reddit 3, out of 408. The other 37.3% went to websites without a type label. The last section explains how the types were labelled.
Every one of ChatGPT's 408 links carried the tag utm_source=chatgpt.com, so a click from a ChatGPT answer reaches your site labelled with its source. Access matters too. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot, its search crawler, "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links". If ChatGPT never names you, why ChatGPT doesn't mention your brand covers the other common causes.
Does ChatGPT cite different websites than Perplexity and Gemini?
Yes. All three are forms of LLM search: a large language model looks up web pages, then writes an answer that links to some of them. For the same questions, the three engines linked different numbers of sources and different kinds of websites.
| Engine | Answers | Citations | Citations per answer (English / Hinglish) | Websites cited | Top 3 websites by citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (web search on) | 160 | 408 | 2.5 / 2.6 | 76 | beminimalist.co, ndtvshopping.com, hindustantimes.com |
| Gemini | 160 | 1,164 | 9.4 / 5.2 | 97 | indisangam.com, magicpin.in, theformalclub.in |
| Perplexity | 160 | 3,068 | 19.6 / 18.8 | 167 | youtube.com, reddit.com, amazon.in |
Perplexity produced 66.1% of all citations in the study (3,068 of 4,640), so any all-engine ranking mostly describes Perplexity. That is why YouTube tops the combined list: Perplexity linked it 518 times, Gemini 14 times and ChatGPT twice. Social platforms made up 26.6% of Perplexity's citations, 1.7% of Gemini's and 1.2% of ChatGPT's.
Gemini leaned hardest on list pages. 65.0% of its citations pointed at URLs with "best" or "top" in the path, against 39.5% for ChatGPT and 30.0% for Perplexity. Perplexity's figure is pulled down by YouTube video links, which carry no words in the URL.
The one website all three cited often was Nykaa: 14 citations on ChatGPT, 83 on Gemini and 79 on Perplexity. A single list of "sites AI cites" hides three different answers, so check each engine on its own. In Depra's Perplexity visibility tracker, you can filter the cited websites by engine.
Do sources change when the question is in Hinglish?
Yes, most of all on Gemini and Perplexity. Gemini showed at least one citation in 90.0% of English answers (72 of 80) and in 41.3% of Hinglish answers (33 of 80). Its citations fell from 749 to 415. Marketplace links held steady (73 in English, 79 in Hinglish), so their share nearly doubled, from 9.7% of Gemini's links to 19.0%.
Which websites get cited shifts too. Answers change between reruns of the same question, so the fair test compares the overlap in cited websites between reruns of the same question with the overlap between its English and Hinglish versions. Overlap here is the share of websites two answers have in common out of all websites either one cited. The gap between the two is the language effect.
| Engine | Overlap between reruns, same language | Overlap between English and Hinglish | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 33.4% | 30.3% | 3.1 points |
| Gemini | 33.1% | 10.8% | 22.3 points |
| Perplexity | 85.2% | 52.8% | 32.4 points |
Some websites nearly vanished in Hinglish. theformalclub.in went from 109 citations in English to 8, and glowdekho.com from 73 to 8. Others grew: magicpin.in went from 53 to 80, and on ChatGPT Minimalist's own site went from 9 to 20. Perplexity cited a Nykaa page in 36.3% of English answers and 47.5% of Hinglish answers. YouTube (250 English, 284 Hinglish) and Reddit (97, 94) held steady.
If your buyers ask in Hinglish, a source list built from English questions is incomplete. The brands named change as well, which our post on how Hinglish changes the brands AI recommends covers.
Why do YouTube and Reddit show up so often?
In this data they show up often on one engine. 97.0% of YouTube citations (518 of 534) and 95.3% of Reddit citations (182 of 191) came from Perplexity.
The YouTube links were concentrated. The 534 citations pointed at 66 distinct videos, linked in 100 answers. Perplexity linked a YouTube video in 56 of its 80 skincare answers and in 32 of its 80 fashion answers.
All 191 Reddit links in these AI search answers came from Indian communities, led by r/IndianSkincareAddicts (82 citations), r/IndianFashionAddicts (42), r/indianrunners (16), r/BuyItForLifeIndia (16), r/skincareaddictsindia (13) and r/SneakersIndia (10).
Our data shows where the links went. It cannot show why an engine chose them. Content deals do not explain the pattern by themselves either. Google announced it had gained access to Reddit's Data API on 22 February 2024, yet Gemini cited Reddit 6 times in 160 answers here, and it cited YouTube, which Google owns, 14 times.
What to do if AI cites sites that never mention your brand
Start with the websites already cited for your buyers' questions, then get your brand onto those pages. Based on this data:
- Get into the list pages. 39.6% of citations went to "best" or "top" URLs, many on small Indian review blogs and on other brands' blogs. Find the lists cited for your category and send the authors samples and facts they can check. Publish an honest comparison page on your own site as well: The Formal Club and The Derma Co were cited for list posts on their own blogs.
- Fix your marketplace listings. The cited Nykaa, Amazon.in, Flipkart and Meesho pages were category, search and price-band listings, such as Nykaa's face wash under ₹500 page. 82 of the 176 Nykaa links jumped to a highlighted passage, usually a product's name, size and price. If your product sits in the wrong category or price filter, it is missing from the page the answer links.
- Get reviewed on YouTube if Perplexity matters to you. Perplexity linked a YouTube video in 88 of its 160 answers. Send products to creators who review your category, and ask them to label paid partnerships.
- Join Reddit threads openly. Answer questions in the communities listed above from an account that says who you are. Do not seed fake threads: it is a brand risk, and nothing in this data shows such threads get cited.
- Check that ChatGPT can reach your site. Your robots.txt file tells bots which pages they may fetch. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links.
- Measure your own category. This study covered 10 questions, and your category's list will differ. Citation gap analysis lists the websites that recommend your competitors but never mention you. The AI action plan ranks up to 12 places to get mentioned. For the longer playbook, read how to get cited by AI.
How we counted, and the limits
We read the stored response for all 480 answers and took every link each answer showed as a source. The website is the link's hostname without "www". Our totals match the study's published figures exactly: 4,640 citations across 247 websites. The engine and language splits, the type shares and the "best" or "top" URL count were computed from the same raw files on 15 September 2026. A URL counts as a list page when its path contains the word "best" or "top".
The type shares by engine and language use one set of labels. The 20 websites in the table keep the types shown there, in four groups: brand websites, publishers and blogs (news, lifestyle, review, company and Medium blogs), marketplaces, and social platforms. Every other website takes its label from the study's published domain list in the repository, with two changes: thedeconstruct.in counts as a brand website, and 7 smaller sites from its marketplace list, such as nalli.com and dropy.in, stay unlabelled because their cited pages did not show that they sell many brands. That published list also counts magicpin.in and smytten.com as marketplaces. We count them as blogs, as the table does, so our marketplace shares are lower than that list would give. The raw answers and analysis code are in the public IndicGEO repository, so anyone can recompute these numbers.
ChatGPT and Gemini answers were captured from their consumer web apps, logged out. Perplexity answers came from its Sonar model with live web search, which may link differently from the Perplexity app. All were asked from inside India at country level.
The limits:
- Two categories. Skincare and fashion only, 10 questions. Other categories may cite different websites.
- One day. Every answer was collected in a 57-minute window on 14 August 2026. Answers can change from week to week.
- Three engines. Google AI Overviews were not part of this study.
- Links shown, reasons unknown. A citation is a link the answer displayed. It does not prove that page caused a brand to be named.
- Our interest. Depra ran and paid for this study and sells AI visibility tracking. The raw data is public.
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