AI answer engines are assembling responses from an unexpectedly small pool of sources, leaving most news outlets, creators, and entire communities nearly invisible to the systems billions of people now use for research and buying decisions. Two new studies reveal structural gaps in how AI systems retrieve and cite information, raising questions about whose voices shape AI-generated answers.

Which News Outlets Actually Show Up in AI Search Results?

A structured analysis of 60 queries about Israel and Jewish topics found that retrieval concentrates heavily in just three newsrooms. The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel each surfaced in 16 of the 60 queries tested, while CTech, the English edition of Calcalist, appeared 10 times and dominated every business and technology question. These three outlets accounted for 42 of 66 total retrievals across the study.

The rest of the field is largely absent. Twelve of the 24 outlets examined never surfaced in a single query. Of 13 Jewish-world and diaspora outlets tested, nine never appeared at all, and none surfaced on diaspora-defining topics including campus antisemitism, community security, Birthright, or Jewish holidays. Across the full set, 27 of 60 queries returned no Israeli or Jewish outlet of any kind.

"When an AI engine answers a question about Israel, that answer is assembled from a very small number of sources. Right now most of the Israeli and Jewish press is not inside it. That is not a media problem, it is a strategic one. The encouraging part is that it is fixable," said Ronn Torossian, Publisher of Everything-PR.

Ronn Torossian, Publisher of Everything-PR

The gap is structural rather than editorial. Outlets surface when their archives are open and crawlable, their pages are entity-rich, and their coverage is structurally deep in a defined category, not on reputation alone.

Why Are Video Creators Completely Missing From AI Answers?

A second audit examining buyer-intent queries found an even more striking absence. Across 109 ranked citations in AI answer engines tested, zero YouTube videos appeared, despite YouTube being the world's second-largest search engine. When the same 15 queries were run directly on YouTube, the platform returned more than 30 creator-led videos from dermatologists, financial analysts, and category specialists.

The queries tested real buyer language across five verticals: Beauty, Tech/SaaS, Personal Finance, Health and Wellness, and Travel. Examples included "best retinol for beginners" and "Whoop vs Oura." Text-based user-generated content from platforms like Medium, Quora, and Reddit appeared in AI answers, but video did not. The gap is fundamentally a format gap.

In B2B SaaS categories, vendors owned 87% of the cited surface, meaning the brand with the most structured text content shapes the AI answer when independent video is absent. Topic specialists beat mega-influencers in visibility, with board-certified dermatologists and single-category reviewers surfacing more often than broad lifestyle stars.

How to Improve Your Visibility in AI Answer Engines

• Open Your Archives: Make your content crawlable by ensuring archives are accessible to search engines and AI systems that feed answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
• Add Structured Data: Use entity-rich markup and structured data to help AI systems understand and categorize your content, making it more likely to surface in relevant queries.
• Build Category Depth: Develop structurally deep coverage in defined categories rather than relying on general reputation; AI systems reward consistent, authoritative coverage in specific topics.
• Measure Retrieval Regularly: Treat AI visibility as an ongoing discipline by monitoring how often your outlets appear in AI-generated answers and adjusting strategy accordingly.

The research suggests that newsrooms and creators can improve their AI visibility through deliberate structural changes rather than editorial quality alone. Everything-PR's study closes with six recommended steps for newsrooms, though the core insight is that the problem is fixable through technical and strategic optimization.

What Do These Gaps Mean for AI Users?

The visibility gaps have real consequences. When AI systems answer questions about Israel, they draw from a narrow slice of available journalism. When consumers research products, they miss creator expertise that exists on YouTube but never reaches AI answer engines. In personal finance, citation half-life is measured in days, meaning rate-sensitive categories cited almost exclusively articles published within the prior two weeks.

"YouTube has never been more important to how consumers research products. AI engines have never been more important to how buyers decide. The fact that the two barely intersect in text-first retrieval is one of the largest visibility gaps in the market right now," said Ronn Torossian, Founder and Chairman of 5W.

Ronn Torossian, Founder and Chairman of 5W

The studies reveal that AI answer engines are not neutral aggregators of all available information. They are shaped by technical factors like crawlability, format compatibility, and structured data implementation. Outlets and creators that understand these mechanics can improve their visibility; those that do not risk becoming invisible to the systems that increasingly mediate how people discover information.

A companion study measuring Hebrew-language Israeli media is in preparation and will be published by Everything-PR shortly, suggesting this research agenda will continue to map visibility gaps across languages and regions.