Which Spanish media does AI cite?

Key findings

1. elpais.com tops the list. It is cited in the answers for 14 of 39 brands, ahead of cadenaser.com (10) and as.com (9).
2. Spanish news and magazines get 3.4% of third-party citations: 1,194 of 35,120.
3. Perplexity relies on them most: 16.4% of its citations, against 2.9% in ChatGPT.
4. Each engine has its favourite: elpais.com in ChatGPT and Perplexity; elmundo.es in Google AI Overviews; eleconomista.es in Google AI Mode.
5. The five most-cited domains take 28.8% of the group’s citations, spread over 93 domains.
6. By sector, they weigh most in retail and ecommerce (7% of citations) and least in industry, construction and B2B services (0.9%).

Data from Mencoro, September 22, 2026 to October 19, 2026: 7,362 answers to the buyer questions that 39 brands track in Spain. The brands are not named. Last updated on October 20, 2026.

The ranking

Ranked by reach: the number of brands whose AI answers cite the domain at least once, then by citations. Reach says more than volume, because one busy market can pile citations on its own niche sites.

Download the data (CSV)

By engine

By sector

Sectors with three or more brands in the data.

Why the press matters in AI answers

Press coverage reaches an AI answer in two ways: as a cited source, and as the text the model learned from. This ranking measures the first. An outlet that engines cite often is one whose articles they retrieve when they search the web to build an answer.

For a brand, that turns a press list into a practical question: which outlets get cited in answers about your market, and on which engine. National dailies tend to lead, but regional and trade outlets often appear in the answers that matter for a specific sector.

What to do with this

1. Check which of these outlets appear in the answers to your own buyer questions, engine by engine, with a tracker such as Mencoro.
2. Plan coverage in the outlets that the engines you care about cite. A publishing marketplace such as Growwer, our sister company, gets articles into them.
3. Measure again after publishing: a citation shows up only if the engine retrieves the page for your questions.

Methodology

• Data: the answers Mencoro captured over the last 28 days for the tracked questions of 39 brands whose market includes Spain, on ChatGPT (with web search), Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. Not every brand tracks every engine, and an engine tracked by fewer than three brands is left out.
• What counts: Spanish news media and magazines, national, regional and trade, from a reviewed list of outlets. Foreign outlets (BBC, The New York Times, Infobae…) are left out.
• Citations: every source link an engine attached to an answer, rolled up to the registrable domain (es.rs-online.com counts as rs-online.com). Each brand’s own domains are set apart and reported separately.
• Source types: assigned from reviewed lists for the most-cited domains and from rules for the rest (public-sector suffixes, universities); anything unlisted counts as a company website.
• Privacy: the brands are not named, and rankings only list domains cited for three or more brands (two on Perplexity and inside a sector).
• Limits: the questions are commercial questions chosen by each brand, not a random sample of what people ask AI, and the mix of sectors shapes the totals.
• Updates: the report is rebuilt every Tuesday from the latest data. Figures quoted elsewhere may come from an earlier week.

How Mencoro captures each answer is public on how Mencoro works.

How to cite this report

Mencoro, “Which Spanish media does AI cite?”, data updated on October 20, 2026, https://mencoro.com/data-studies/top-spanish-media/. You are welcome to use the figures and charts with a link to this page.