Who Gets Named: Citation Type Predicts Individual Naming by Grounded Language Models, and a Roster Instrument Captures 0.5% of It
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Abstract (arXiv)
Prior work on AI brand visibility measures the firm: does a model recommend a company, and does that track its reputation. This study asks the question one level down, in categories where the buyer picks a person. It issued 2,400 grounded API calls in one two-hour window on 24 July 2026: 120 buyer-intent prompts, four models (GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Perplexity Sonar Pro, Grok 4.5), five iterations each, four European markets and five query languages. Every response was coded for whether it named an individual professional, by a rule cascade that never consults a roster and that drops detections resolving to a same-named American city (precision 96.9%, recall 61.7%, so every rate below is a lower bound). All inference corrects for clustering within prompt: intraclass correlation 0.258, effective n 407 against a nominal 2,400. Models named an individual in 25.8% of responses. Category dominates: real estate 35.4% and car dealerships 32.9% against insurance 9.1% (chi-square 159.3, p = 5.8e-8 after correction). Models differ four-fold, from Grok 38.0% to Gemini 9.3%. Citation type predicts naming and citation volume does not: naming responses cite the individual's own site 2.6 points more often (95% CI +1.4 to +3.9) and category portals 4.3 points more often, and cite firm-owned pages at the same rate (44.1% against 45.5%). On nine matched translation pairs, English prompts named an individual in 36.7% of responses against 15.6% for the same question in the local language (OR 3.14, clustered p = 0.074, so the direction is clear and the design cannot close it). A 939-person roster built from public LinkedIn search matched 128 of 27,293 name-shaped mentions (0.47%), 26 of the 939 people were ever named, and the roster-derived rates of 0.0% to 25.4% measure that overlap. Roster-based measurement of individual AI visibility sees a small and unrepresentative slice of what models do.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 18 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2026.
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References · 18
- 2018Datasheets for Datasetscited by 1,371
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- 2025Auditing Google's AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancycited by 7
- 2025Whose Name Comes Up? Auditing LLM-Based Scholar Recommendationscited by 5
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- 2026The Language Blind Spot: How Query Language and Brand Recognition Tier Shape AI-Constructed Brand Reputation Across Twelve European Languagescited by 4
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- 2026How Large Language Models Source Brand Reputation Across Languages and Marketscited by 3
- 2026Where Does the Noise Come From? A Variance-Components Decomposition of Non-Determinism in LLM Brand Answerscited by 3
- 2023Platformization of Inequality: Gender and Race in Digital Labor Platformscited by 2
6 more
- 2026A Scalable Entity-Based Framework for Auditing Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Whose Name Comes Up? II: Benchmarking and Intervention-Based Auditing of LLM-Based Scholar Recommendationcited by 2
- 2026What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Enginescited by 2
- 2026Whose Name Comes Up? III: Persona Prompting Effects in LLM-Based Scholar Recommendationcited by 1
- 2026Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systemscited by 1
- 2026What Do Chinese-Language Generative Search Engines Cite and Surface? A Large-Scale Empirical Studycited by 1
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