When prospective clients research pricing for fractional leadership and consulting engagements, search engines and AI assistants increasingly synthesize answers from a narrow set of sources. A recent benchmark examined eleven executive and consulting cost questions across multiple AI configurations to measure which reference domains get cited and how stable those citation lists remain over time.
The findings reveal striking consistency in how certain engines select sources. In Perplexity, citation patterns were nearly static across repeated tests. On nine out of eleven cost queries, every single domain listed by the API appeared in all ten runs. Rather than dynamically shifting recommendations, the model retrieved the exact same sources repeatedly.
Google AI Overviews showed similar concentration across thirty-one recorded responses for the same queries. A small cluster of platforms dominated the citations. The most frequently cited domains were gofractional.com with twenty-one appearances, linkedin.com with nineteen, and fractionus.com with eighteen.
For advisory firms and fractional executives, these patterns matter. AI synthesis engines do not pull pricing context evenly across the web. Instead, they rely on a compact pool of established networks and fractional directories. You can review the complete data set and domain distribution at https://bit.ly/which-sites-ai-tools-list-executive-cost
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