5W benchmark of 28,400 prompts finds a16z.com is the lone venture-firm domain among the top sources AI assistants cite. Three firms capture 55% of all VC citations.

MIAMI, May 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- When founders and investors ask an AI engine about venture capital, the answer leans on Wikipedia, TechCrunch, and Crunchbase — and on exactly one venture firm's own website. 

The Venture Capital AI Visibility Index 2026, released by 5W, the AI Communications Firm, is the first public two-wave benchmark of how often U.S. venture firms and named partners are surfaced, cited, and recommended inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. It analyzed 28,400 prompts, 60 firms, and 100 named partners across two testing waves between January and May 2026. 

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led at 21.4% Citation Share — followed by Sequoia Capital (17.8%) and Y Combinator (15.9%). The three firms together captured 55.1% of all observed VC citations. 

The structural finding: a16z.com is the only venture-firm-owned domain to rank among the top 10 cited sources, appearing in 7.1% of retrieved responses — ahead of Forbes, PitchBook, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal. No other firm's owned content ranked in the top 25. AI assistants, in this dataset, treat a16z-published content as primary source material. 

The Index also found that assets under management no longer predict AI visibility. Insight Partners, with roughly $80 billion in AUM, registered just 1.6% Citation Share. Tiger Global, at roughly $50 billion, registered 1.3%. Sustained earned media and owned-content publishing correlated with visibility far more strongly than fund size. 

Reputational events proved sticky: FTX continued to surface in 23% of crypto-VC responses, and the WeWork episode in 14% of SoftBank-related responses, years after the fact. 

"Andreessen Horowitz spent a decade building a media company inside a venture firm," said Ronn Torossian, Founder and Chairman of 5W. "They're the only ones who did. The AI now treats their content as source — and the rest of the industry is being described by Wikipedia and TechCrunch." 

The full Index is available at https://www.5wpr.com/ai-visibility-index/venture-capital/.

About 5W 

5W is the AI Communications Firm — building brand authority across the platforms where decisions now happen: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, alongside earned media, digital, and influencer channels. 5W combines public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and proprietary AI visibility research to help clients measure and grow their presence in AI-driven buyer research.

Founded in 2002, 5W is recognized as a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's, named Agency of the Year in the American Business Awards®, honored as a 2026 Top Place to Work in Communications by Ragan, and named to Digiday's WorkLife Employer of the Year list. 5W serves clients across B2C sectors — Beauty & Fashion, Consumer Brands, Entertainment, Food & Beverage, Health & Wellness, Travel & Hospitality, Technology, and Nonprofit — and B2B specialties including Corporate Communications, Reputation Management, Public Affairs, Crisis Communications, and Digital Marketing across Social, Influencer, Paid Media, GEO, and SEO.

Learn more at 5wpr.com.

Media Contact
Chris Bergin
cbergin@5wpr.com

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SOURCE 5W Public Relations