TechCrunch Outcites AIJourn 23 to 1 in AI Answers: What the Machine Relations Index Shows

Do AI engines cite high-volume, machine-generated publishing over real journalism? The Machine Relations Index answers that on a measured denominator, and the answer is no.

Measured across 16,039 monitored answer runs on six engines, techcrunch.com is cited in 164 of them. aijourn.com is cited in 7, on two engines, across seven days, which does not clear the evidence floor for a published rate at all. TechCrunch is cited roughly 23 times as often.

The measured table

Machine Relations Index release mri_score_v2.0+2026-09-20+47973f373a20, window 2026-05-10 to 2026-09-20, 127 days, 919 monitored prompts, 16,039 answer runs, 22,320 cited domains, six engines. A domain counts once per answer run in which it is cited, and nothing publishes a rate or a rank until it clears an evidence floor of 10 observed runs across 7 distinct dates.¹

Publication	Citation rate	Cited runs	Days cited	Engines	Measured standing
forbes.com	4.15%	665	106 of 127	6	rank 2 of 1,230
techcrunch.com	1.02%	164	44 of 127	5	rank 9 of 1,230
reuters.com	0.08%	13	13 of 127	3	below the floor for a rank
digitaljournal.com	0.06%	10	8 of 127	3	below the floor for a rank
aijourn.com	0.04%	7	7 of 127	2	below the floor for a rank

How to read the editorial-class rank. The editorial-class rank above is read off the Machine Relations Index's source_role field, which in the current release combines source-type evidence with AuthorityTech's placement catalog; 96 of the 1,231 class members are admitted through the catalog, and the Index is moving editorial classification to source-type evidence alone. The class currently includes six platform domains alongside edited newsrooms: medium.com (class rank 1), amazon.com (7), prnewswire.com (8), apple.com (16), wordpress.com (239) and blogspot.com (330). At the same time substack.com, beehiiv.com and dev.to — the same hosted open-publishing product as Medium — are filed as community platforms. Those six hold 1,358 of the editorial class's 13,525 cited runs, 10.04%, and they include the class's top slot. The class denominator also moves between releases (published figures carry 1,025 to 1,230) because it counts the domains classified in each release. What is unaffected: the citation rate, cited runs, days cited, engine breadth and confidence on this page are direct per-domain observations over a fixed run set, and are the primary measure; read the rate first.

Forbes is the second most-cited editorial publication in the entire release, on 106 of 127 days across all six engines.

What a sound citation measurement requires

Two properties separate a measurement of engine selection from a count of URLs.

The first is a fixed denominator. A cumulative counter reporting a running total can only go up, and it ranks whoever publishes the most URLs. A site publishing dozens of templated pages a day will always win that count, which says nothing about machine judgment. The Index counts a domain once per answer run in which it is cited, over a fixed window, so a rate can fall as well as rise.

The second is engine breadth. A domain that looks dominant in a corpus drawn largely from one crawler is telling you about that crawler's coverage, not about what six engines choose to cite. Measured across six, AIJourn appears on two of them, seven times in 127 days.

What the measured picture shows

The mechanism concern is real in principle: structural signals like volume, recency and formatting are easier to manufacture than editorial judgment, and retrieval systems that weight the former will be gameable in principle. The Index does not show it happening at scale.

Across six engines and 127 days, the publications engines return to are Medium at a 5.04% citation rate and Forbes at 4.15%, cited on 109 and 106 separate days respectively. The wire and press-release distribution class as a whole takes 0.21% of classified citation and held zero of 880 top-ten segment slots on the release before this one. One note on reading that class figure: the Index files prnewswire.com, the largest wire domain in it, as an editorial publication, so that nine-domain class leaves it out; counted with the wires, the class is ten domains at 414 of 112,518 cited runs, or 0.37% of classified citation. It does not change the finding: prnewswire.com's best standing in any published segment is #15 of 448, so the class still holds 0 of 880 top-ten slots. High-volume syndication surfaces are not dominating AI citation.

Three questions to ask any citation leaderboard

Before relying on a leaderboard, and certainly before naming anyone on one, ask it three questions. Can the number go down, or is it a cumulative total wearing a window's label? How many engines observed it, because a source seen by one index is a crawl artifact, not a market position? And what is the floor below which it refuses to publish a rate at all?

The engines are specific about what they crawl and how to control it: Google's common crawlers, OpenAI's bots, Perplexity's bots, Anthropic's crawler policy. A public claim about a named publisher should meet at least that standard of specificity.

If you want to see where your own brand sits on a measured denominator rather than a counter, run an AI visibility audit.

Updated 2026-09-23: figures reflect the current Machine Relations Index methodology; see the MRI methodology and update log.

Notes

Footnotes

1. Machine Relations Index, release mri_score_v2.0+2026-09-20+47973f373a20, window 2026-05-10 to 2026-09-20, 919 monitored prompts, 16,039 answer runs, 22,320 cited domains, six engines. Read live 2026-09-20 at https://machinerelations.ai/index and the linked domain profiles. ↩