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Despite the increasing number of Gravitational Wave (GW) detections, theastrophysical origin of Binary Black Hole (BBH) mergers remains elusive. Apromising formation channel for BBHs is inside accretion discs aroundsupermassive black holes, that power Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). In thispaper, we test for the first time the spatial correlation between observed GWevents and AGN. To this end, we assemble all sky catalogues with 1,412 (242)AGN with a bolometric luminosity greater than $10^{45.5} {\rm erg\ s}^{-1}$($10^{46}\,{\rm erg\,s}^{-1}$) with spectroscopic redshift of $z\leq0.3$ fromthe Milliquas catalogue, version 7.7b. These AGN are cross-matched withlocalisation volumes of BBH mergers observed in the same redshift range by theLIGO and Virgo interferometers during their first three observing runs. We findthat the fraction of the detected mergers originated in AGN brighter than$10^{45.5}\,{\rm erg\,s}^{-1}$ ($10^{46}\,{\rm erg\,s}^{-1}$) cannot be higherthan $0.49$ ($0.17$) at a 95 per cent credibility level. Our upper limits implya limited BBH merger production efficiency of the brightest AGN, while most orall GW events may still come from lower luminosity ones. Alternatively, the AGNformation path for merging stellar-mass BBHs may be actually overallsubdominant in the local Universe. To our knowledge, ours are the firstobservational constraints on the fractional contribution of the AGN channel tothe observed BBH mergers.

The most luminous AGN do not produce the majority of the detected stellar-mass black hole binary mergers in the local Universe