a16z tops VC AI visibility index as citations concentrate among few firms

Andreessen Horowitz is emerging as the clearest winner in venture capital’s new visibility fight, and the gap is already wide. In 5W AI Intelligence’s Venture Capital AI Visibility Index 2026, a16z led with 21.4% citation share, Sequoia Capital followed at 17.8%, and Y Combinator held 15.9%. Together, those three firms accounted for 55.1% of all observed VC citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

The benchmark analyzed 28,400 prompts, 60 firms, and 100 named partners in two testing waves run between January and May 2026. It is billed as the first public two-wave measure of how often U.S. venture firms and named partners are surfaced, cited, and recommended inside answer engines, and its clearest message is concentration. AI visibility in venture capital is not spreading evenly; it is clustering around a small set of brands that already dominate the conversation.

The most striking structural finding was that a16z.com was the only venture-firm-owned editorial domain to rank among the top 10 cited sources, appearing in 7.1% of retrieved responses. No other firm-owned content made the top 25. The rest of the citation stack was led by third-party information sources that shape the venture narrative day after day, including Wikipedia, TechCrunch, Crunchbase, The Information, Forbes, PitchBook, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal.

That pattern suggests that source selection, not just balance sheet size, is driving discovery. Insight Partners, with roughly $80 billion in assets under management, registered only 1.6% citation share. Tiger Global, with roughly $50 billion, came in at 1.3%. The report’s read is blunt: sustained earned media and owned-content publishing line up far more closely with AI visibility than raw capital or firm size.

The index also showed how stubborn reputation can be once it enters the machine. FTX still surfaced in 23% of crypto-VC responses, while the WeWork saga appeared in 14% of SoftBank-related responses, years after both became cautionary tales. 5W said founders, limited partners, and reporters are increasingly starting venture-capital research inside answer engines, which makes these citation loops more than a media curiosity. As Ronn Torossian put it, Andreessen Horowitz spent a decade building “a media company inside a venture firm,” and the rest of the industry is still being described by Wikipedia and TechCrunch.