Four of the twelve models return the sources they read before answering. Across the 3,270 answers that carry a source list, 40,252 citations name 306 sites. This page counts them: which sites the answers cite, how much of the citing goes to the vendors themselves, and how much to the review sites that sell placement. It is a fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.
A vendor's own domain is matched from the vendor table, so a vendor with no domain on file counts as everything else. Review sites are g2.com, capterra.com, gartner.com, trustradius.com, softwareadvice.com, getapp.com and the rest of a fixed list. The split says where the text a model read came from; it does not say the text decided the answer, and the index makes no claim that it did.
Every product page carries the same count for its own answers under What carried it into the answer, and every category page lists the sites its answers cited.
HR AI Recommendation Index, September 2026 Edition: citations. hr-ai-index.com/research/what-the-answers-cite/. Published under CC BY 4.0. Every figure on this page is computed from the published edition and changes with it; the edition and its date are the citation.
The output is the models' output. Nothing here says the models can be steered, and nothing here is a recommendation by the index.