New ICODA research measuring 40 crypto news domains across six AI platforms finds Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini citing the category 4.1 times less often than ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok combined, with six publishers receiving zero Google AI citations despite strong visibility elsewhere.
ICODA, a growth marketing agency for Web3 and iGaming brands, today published original research quantifying a gap between how much traffic Google says its AI systems send publishers and how often those same systems actually cite them.
The research lands weeks after Google’s Nick Fox, Senior Vice President of Knowledge and Information, stated on 17 July 2026 that Google’s AI features in Search alone send billions of clicks to websites every week. Five days later, Alphabet reported $119.8 billion in quarterly revenue, up 24%, with Search advertising up 17% to $63.27 billion. That same week, the Wall Street Journal reported that USA Today, Politico, Reuters, The Economist, People Inc., and Reddit were weighing whether to block Google’s crawler entirely.
The finding. ICODA measured 55,055 AI citations across 40 crypto news domains, split by infrastructure owner: Google (AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini) versus independent platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok).
- Google infrastructure: 10,728 citations, 19.5% of the total.
- Independent infrastructure: 44,327 citations, 80.5% of the total.
The independent platforms cite this category 4.1 times more often than everything Google operates combined.
The gap is not a sampling artifact. If the measurement tool were simply drawing from a smaller prompt set for Google’s surfaces, every domain would hit the same ceiling. Instead, Google’s share of an individual domain’s citations ranges from 0% to 55.6%. Forkast.news draws 55.6% of its AI citations from Google, while six other publishers draw none. A thin sampling corpus cannot produce a domain at 56% alongside domains at zero; the variation reflects which domains Google’s systems draw from, not a limitation of the measurement.
Six publishers are cited nowhere in Google’s AI. Cointelegraph, cryptodaily.co.uk, Bitcoinist, NewsBTC, The Daily Hodl, and Blockworks each hold zero citations across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini combined, while continuing to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok. Cointelegraph alone appears in 1,078 AI answers today; none belong to Google.
Google’s AI concentrates citations more heavily than the independents do. Google’s five most-cited domains in the category hold 64.1% of everything Google’s AI infrastructure cites; its top ten hold 85.6%. For the independent platforms, the same figures are 51.2% and 69.4%.
“Google’s public statements and the publishers’ complaints aren’t actually in conflict: they’re describing different things,” said Anastasia Shalepina, AI SEO specialist of ICODA. “Google reports a numerator with no denominator. What we measured is the denominator’s shape: one in five citations to this category comes from Google’s own AI, and that fifth is distributed as a shortlist, not an index.”
Methodology. ICODA analyzed 40 crypto news and editorial domains (exchanges, price trackers, and data aggregators excluded as transactional rather than editorial), using Ahrefs organic-traffic data (June 2024 to July 2026) and AI citation counts across six platforms, snapshotted 10 August 2026. The complete report includes the full dataset and per-domain metrics.
About ICODA: a global agency specializing in full-cycle digital marketing, public relations, and growth strategies for Web3, DeFi, GameFi, iGaming, and crypto exchanges. Their core services includes Crypto PR, influencer/KOL campaigns, community management, token sale execution, and AI Overviews SEO and GEO.
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