DeepSeek Cites 83% of Its Top Search Result. We Tested 100 Prompts to Find What Gets You There

Maddie Wang

Founder of Vision & OGTool, Ex-Stanford, Bootstrapped to $1M organically

The short answer: three things get your brand into DeepSeek's answers, and they build on each other. Quality backlinks raise your authority score. A higher score gets your site ranked and cited. And the more websites that mention you, the higher you land in DeepSeek's recommendations.

In part one, we found that DeepSeek gives every website an authority score from 0 to 4, and that the score follows quality backlinks. The obvious next question: does a higher score actually get you into DeepSeek's answers?

So we asked DeepSeek 100 everyday questions, from "best coffee subscription" to "best CRM for a small business", with its web search turned on. We recorded every website it found, every website it cited, and every brand it recommended. Then we read all 1,313 pages it used, to see which brands each one named.

Claim 1: Quality backlinks give you a higher authority score

From part one: four example websites from every DeepSeek authority tier. October 2026.

This was the finding of part one. Across 87 websites, every step up DeepSeek's scale came with many more quality backlinks, meaning links from real, established websites. The typical authority-3 site had 2,294 of them, the typical authority-1 site had 13, and sites DeepSeek hadn't indexed had about 3.

Total backlinks didn't decide it. Poppi has fewer backlinks than Graza but more quality ones, and Poppi scores a 3 to Graza's 2.

Claim 2: A higher authority score gets your site cited more

Site rank is a website's position in DeepSeek's own search results (not Google's), across 73 "best X" questions. "Cited in answer" is how many of the websites at that site rank DeepSeek's answers linked, out of how many its searches ranked there.

Before DeepSeek answers, it searches the web and ranks what it finds. Read the screenshot top to bottom: the higher a website ranks, the higher its authority score, and the more often DeepSeek cites it. DeepSeek cited 83% of websites at site rank #1 (105 of 126) and 53% at site rank #10 (72 of 135).

Authority is what gets you near the top. A score-4 website landed in the top 3 of DeepSeek's searches 48% of the time, and a score-1 website 11%. Websites DeepSeek hasn't indexed never showed up at all: not once in more than 17,000 search results.

Here's what that looks like site by site. Low-authority sites do come up in DeepSeek's search results, often. Newsbreak.com came up for 34 questions and archive.org for 27, and DeepSeek never cited either one. The score-3 and score-4 sites were cited 20% to 41% of the time.

"Questions found in" is how many of our 100 questions the site came up for in the top 50 search results. "Cited in answer" is how often DeepSeek's answer cited it, out of those questions. The 4 most-seen sites at each authority score, leaving out social networks and search engines.

Claim 3: The more websites mention you, the higher you rank in DeepSeek's answers

Being cited is one thing. Being the brand DeepSeek tells people to buy is another. For that, what mattered most was how many websites name you.

Every brand DeepSeek recommended across the "best X" questions, by its position in the answer.

DeepSeek's #1 recommendation was typically named on about 7 of the websites it read, and the #1 pick on about 3. The further down the answer a brand appeared, the fewer websites named it: about 2 for brands in 9th place or lower.

A brand named on one page DeepSeek read made the answer about 5% of the time. A brand named on five or more, about 70%.

One big site vs. many sites

For "What is the best coffee subscription in the US?", DeepSeek's #1 result was Wirecutter: score 4, cited in the answer. Wirecutter's featured pick was Black & White Coffee Roasters. DeepSeek didn't mention Black & White at all.

Instead, its top pick was Trade, the #1 pick on three other websites (New York Magazine, Wired and Yahoo) and named on ten. Second place went to Atlas Coffee Club, a #1 pick on three websites and named on nine.

The same thing happened across the study. The best predictor of DeepSeek's top pick was the brand the most websites ranked #1, not the pick of the most authoritative website:

In 27 questions, the most-voted pick and the highest-authority site's pick were different brands. DeepSeek went with the vote 15 times, and with the highest-authority site 4 times.

What this means for your brand

Earn quality backlinks. They raise your authority score. In part one, about 30 were almost always enough to be indexed, and authority 3 started at about 1,000.
Use that authority to get ranked and cited. Higher-scored sites land near the top of DeepSeek's searches, and the top results get cited.
Get mentioned on as many websites as you can, ideally as their #1 pick. One mention on a giant site lost to mentions across several smaller ones. The brands DeepSeek recommends are the ones that keep showing up.

For your technical team: how we measured it

Method

Answers. We asked DeepSeek (deepseek-flash) 100 questions through its Anthropic-compatible Messages API with the native web_search tool on (two searches per answer). We asked it to link its sources inline, since by default its answers name sources in prose without links. 73 of the questions were "best X" or "which X" questions.
Authority. The web_search results don't include an authority score, so we re-ran every query DeepSeek issued through the Search API, which does, and filled the rest with site: lookups. Scores are per domain.
Search position. A website's position (1 to 10) within the DeepSeek search that found it.
Cited. The answer linked any page on that domain.
Each page's brands and #1 pick. We fetched every source page with DeepSeek's Fetch API and had DeepSeek (no search, no thinking) list the brands each page recommends, and its single top recommendation.
Position on DeepSeek. The order brands first appear in DeepSeek's answer, counted once per brand. A website is counted once per question, even if it appeared in both searches.

More numbers

How often a website lands in the top 3 of DeepSeek's searches, by authority score (all 100 questions):

At the same search position, authority made little difference to being cited (54% for score 1 vs. 53% for score 4 at positions 7 to 10). Authority works by getting you ranked higher.

Brand made the answer, by how many source pages named it:

When one brand was the #1 pick on more websites than any other (46 questions), it was DeepSeek's top pick 65% of the time.

Limits

This is correlation. A brand many websites name may also simply be the most popular one.
One model (deepseek-flash), in English, with mostly US-focused questions.
Brands and #1 picks were extracted by DeepSeek from page text and will contain some errors. Brands were matched across pages by their website.
12% of the brands DeepSeek recommended weren't named on any page it read. It added those from its own knowledge, and this method can't measure them.
Some groups are small (for example, only 24 score-4 pages named a top pick), so treat those as directional.

Scope

October 2026: 100 answers, 461 Search API calls, 1,313 page fetches, about 2,700 extraction calls and about 2,400 domain lookups.

How OGTool gets you into DeepSeek's answers

All three steps come down to other websites: linking to you, which raises your authority, and mentioning you, which gets you recommended. OGTool gives you both.

More quality backlinks. OGTool clients are established businesses whose websites average a domain rating of about 150, comfortably above the quality bar from part one. Every client's blog posts earn links from the rest of the network, several times a week, so your authority score climbs.

More mentions across more websites. Those same network sites mention and recommend your brand in their content, so when DeepSeek reads the web to answer a shopper's question, your name keeps showing up on site after site. That's exactly the pattern behind DeepSeek's top recommendations.

Content that earns its place. We track the questions your shoppers ask AI assistants every day, find the pages being cited, and turn them into posts on your site. We tell you the day you start getting cited.

Example: Vision (vson.ai)

Vision launched a brand-new domain in July with no backlinks. Three months into OGTool, its domain rating went from 0 to 140, on the same 0 to 1000 scale used in part one.

As its authority rose, so did its visibility. Vision went from 0 tracked keywords in August to 13 won in the week of October 19, including 6 cited by ChatGPT and 6 in Google's AI Overview.

Want to know your DeepSeek authority score, and your competitors'? We'll run the numbers for your brand and your top three competitors, free.