Citation share = % of cited responses pointing to each brand's domain. Differs from mention share (Share of voice page) which counts name appearances regardless of citation.
Sample: 30 AI responses where one of the four tracked brand domains was cited, aggregated across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode for UK Software M&A Market. Source data refreshed 06 Jun 2026.
Thoma Bravo leads citation share at 53.3%, followed by Hg Capital at 20.0%; together they account for roughly 73% of all domain-anchored citations in this space. Summit Partners holds 16.7% and Civica rounds out the cited brands at 10.0%. Elevare Software currently sits at 0.0%, meaning AI engines are not yet pulling answers from elevaresoftware.com when responding to UK software M&A queries. Citation share differs from mention share in an important way: mention share counts how often a brand name appears in AI responses, while citation share measures whether AI engines treat a brand's own domain as an authoritative source worth linking to. A brand can be mentioned frequently yet never cited, which signals weak domain authority in the eyes of generative engines. The remaining tracked brands (Vista Equity Partners, Constellation Software, Jonas Software, Insight Partners, Accel-KKR, ECI Solutions) also register 0.0% citation share, placing Elevare in a cluster where the opportunity is equal but the gap to the leaders remains significant.
Aggregated from URLs returned by ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode for tracked UK Software M&A Market queries. Example prompts are sourced from the tracked conversations cache and indicate the kinds of queries on which each domain was cited.
The top cited domains span at least five distinct content categories across the UK Software M&A Market. Encyclopedic and editorial sources lead the list: en.wikipedia.org (47 responses) and Forbes (12) provide foundational brand-identity and industry context. Professional networks and social platforms follow, with LinkedIn (17) and YouTube (12) surfacing for discovery and thought-leadership queries. Competitor domains hold a notable presence; thomabravo.com (16 responses) ranks third overall, demonstrating that PE firms with strong owned content earn direct citations. Community forums like Reddit (15) supply peer-level deal commentary, while data platforms such as PitchBook (12) and news wire services (Reuters, CNBC) anchor fact-based transaction queries. The pattern is clear: AI engines compose their answers from a broad content ecosystem rather than any single source type. Encyclopedic citations cluster around brand-identity and definitional queries, competitor owned sites surface for deal-track and portfolio questions, and social or forum content appears where users seek qualitative sentiment or community perspectives.
Top URLs AI engines cite when answering UK Software M&A Market questions.
These are the actual URLs AI engines cited in the tracked period. They are verifiable proof rather than aggregated statistics. Each URL can be opened to inspect the cited content and the surrounding context AI engines used when assembling answers.
elevaresoftware.com is cited in 0 AI responses across UK Software M&A queries, but www.thomabravo.com dominates with 16 citations, a ∞x advantage. Plus, retail aggregators (—) and social platforms (www.youtube.com, www.facebook.com) account for the highest citation volume overall. These are the PR seeding targets that compound across all three AI platforms.
ⓘ Methodology: Citation Share Click to verify against source
What this measures
Citation Share is the percentage of cited URLs in AI responses that point to each brand's own domain. Calculated as (brand's domain citations) / (total citations from all tracked brand domains). Measures whether AI engines use the brand's website as a source. This is a different signal from Mention SoV, which measures whether the brand is talked about by name.
Methodology
Weekly live citation tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews. Cross-checked against source data.
Known limitations
- Mention vs. citation can diverge significantly. A brand can have high name recognition (Mention SoV) but low source authority (Citation Share), or vice versa. The dashboard surfaces this divergence as insight in the AI Intelligence Brief.
- Citation Share is filtered to Software M&A & Private Equity-relevant domains. Non-niche cited URLs are excluded to avoid noise from cross-topic query overlap (e.g., generic e-commerce, travel, telecom).
- A brand showing 0% citation share may mean either (a) genuinely no citations, or (b) the brand's domain isn't being surfaced as a source by AI engines for this query set. Both are honest signals.