When a large language model (LLM) answers a question about a company, it grounds the answer in retrieved web sources, and those sources decide what the model says. Most analysis of AI brand visibility looks at the answer text. This study looks one step earlier, at the citations. We merge three Rankfor.AI datasets covering 128 brands across 12 home markets and 13 languages, and analyse 167,551 URL-grounded citations (189,974 total attribution rows). We classify each citation by domain and source type and measure where AI gets its brand information, by language and by market. Four patterns hold. First, AI grounds brand answers overwhelmingly in third-party sources: 85.7% of citations point to sites the brand does not own, against 14.3% owned. Second, the source base is concentrated and long-tailed: 80% of citations come from about 18% of domains, fitting a Zipf law (alpha = 0.86, R^2 = 0.983). Third, one reference site dominates almost everywhere: Wikipedia is the most-cited domain in 11 of 12 languages, the exception being Lithuanian, where the business daily vz.lt edges it (4.38%). Fourth, the source mix is market-specific at the margin: for 46 Polish national brands the most-cited domain is YouTube, and four HR and careers portals supply 637 citations against 297 for Polish Wikipedia, about twice as many.
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate how people form impressions of organisations, yet most monitoring is done in English, assuming an English query returns a representative picture. We measure how far that holds. We queried three grounded LLMs (GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Perplexity Sonar Pro) about 66 brands from eleven Northern, Baltic, and Central European markets, in twelve languages across four families (Germanic, Uralic, Baltic, Slavic), generating 35,640 responses. Multilingual embeddings (BGE-M3) allow cross-language comparison without translation. Three results emerge. First, AI-constructed reputation is language-bound: mean cross-language cosine similarity is 0.825, same-family responses are more similar than cross-family (0.844 vs 0.820; d = 0.31), and sentiment varies by language (F = 268.5, eta^2 = 0.077), with Uralic and Baltic languages most positive and Germanic, including English, most critical; clustering recovers the Slavic and Baltic families (cophenetic 0.915). Second, query language shifts which brands are recommended far more than how they are described: moving from an English query to a brand's home language raises recommendation share by 0.80 for local champions but only 0.15 for global multinationals (t = -8.84, p < 0.001), with no comparable reversal in sentiment. An English-only audit therefore understates a local champion's AI visibility. Third, response stability varies more with model choice than with language (eta^2_model = 0.32 vs eta^2_language = 0.01, on a five-iteration replication over a 20-brand subset). These results indicate that English-only AI reputation monitoring leaves a measurable language blind spot, concentrated in the visibility of locally headquartered brands.