Why DA Is Irrelevant for AI Citations (Data from 7 Site Audits)

De Domain authority does not predict AI citations. Ahrefs has DA 92 and gets cited by AI platforms only 5% of the time. citability.de launched with DA under 10 and achieved a 15% citation rate on day one. That 3x gap, between the most authoritative domain and a brand-new site with almost no backlinks, is not noise. It is the clearest possible signal that AI source selection runs on completely different rules than Google rankings. I ran AI Visibility Readiness audits on 7 websites and tested each against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.