{
  "measured_by": "GetIntel",
  "measured_on": "2026-08-11",
  "question": "If you have no agency and no budget, where do the citations in your category actually live?",
  "method": "Every domain among the 50 most-cited in our probe corpus was classified into three groups: platforms any founder can publish to today at no cost, companies selling tools in this category, and everything else. Classification is our own judgement and is published per domain so it can be disputed.",
  "scope": {
    "domains": 50,
    "citations": 19569
  },
  "groups": {
    "open_platforms": {
      "domains": [
        "github.com",
        "instagram.com",
        "linkedin.com",
        "medium.com",
        "reddit.com",
        "youtube.com"
      ],
      "citations": 5171,
      "pct": 26.4,
      "note": "No paywall, no gatekeeper, no agency required. A founder can publish to all six this afternoon."
    },
    "arxiv_counted_separately": {
      "citations": 740,
      "pct": 3.8,
      "note": "arXiv is free but not realistically open to most SaaS companies: it is an academic preprint server and some categories require endorsement. Excluded from the open-platform figure rather than used to inflate it."
    },
    "category_vendors": {
      "citations": 7831,
      "pct": 40.0
    }
  },
  "headline": "26.4% of citations among the 50 most-cited domains sit on six platforms any founder can publish to at no cost, led by YouTube at 1,876 and Reddit at 1,701. Category vendors hold 40.0%.",
  "what_this_does_not_mean": "Publishing to those platforms does not earn a citation. These are the domains engines cite, not evidence that anything you post there will be cited. The claim is narrower: a large share of the citation surface in this category is not gated behind a budget.",
  "limits": "One category, 50 domains, one day. Classification into open/vendor/other is editorial. YouTube's 1,876 is a platform total aggregated across many videos, not one page."
}