How AI Assistants Cite Economics Content

The finding worth the most attention

Citations grew roughly eightfold over the window. Engagement did not follow. In the week ending 14 August the site recorded 8 weekly-active students, and average engagement time was about 22 seconds, down from roughly 52 seconds measured over the site's whole history.

One reading is that a reader arriving from an AI answer already has the answer, so the visit is a verification rather than a study session. This data cannot settle that on its own, and the two series are measured by different systems over different windows, so treat the pairing as an observation rather than a causal claim.

Citation is winner-take-most, even inside one site

Across 275 cited pages the median page received 13 citations while the mean was 68.7. The distribution has a Gini coefficient of 0.766, which is severe concentration by any standard.

Five pages out of 275 accounted for 30.6% of every citation the site received. Publishing more pages did not spread citations evenly across them.

Page format changes citation rate about sevenfold

Grouping cited pages by what kind of page they are, citations per page vary by roughly a factor of seven between the best and worst performing formats.

Short reference definitions are the largest group by page count and the smallest by citations per page. Interactive graph pages, which contain very little prose, sit second.

What the queries look like

Of 9,715 citations attributable to a specific grounding query, 2,835 came from queries containing the words graph, diagram, curve or draw, and 1,379 from queries containing formula or calculate. Together that is close to half.

Bing also reports a citation share per query, meaning the fraction of that query's total citations that went to this site. Share and volume rank differently: the queries where the site is cited most often are frequently not the queries where it holds the smallest share of what is available.

Method, and what this data cannot tell you

• Source: Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance report, citation source "Microsoft Copilots and Partners". Three exports: 9 July, 12 August and 14 August 2026.
• Bing states in its own interface that these figures are a sample of overall activity and may be revised as more data is processed. They are not a census.
• Single-site data. Everything here describes how one economics education site was cited. Generalising past that needs a second site.
• The snapshots are unevenly spaced, 34 days then 2, and the site was actively publishing throughout, so growth figures mix new pages with existing pages gaining citations.
• No page in the sample lost citations between the first and last snapshot (0 declines), which is worth noting as a property of this window rather than a general law.
• Engagement figures come from separate site analytics over a different window and are not joined to individual citations. Nothing here tracks a specific reader from an AI answer to a session.