SEO glossary
AI citations
An AI citation is a reference an AI assistant credits inside its answer — the sources listed beside or beneath the text it generated.
It is the unit of visibility that replaces a ranking position when the answer is generated rather than listed. Nobody scrolls a list of ten; they read a paragraph and sometimes follow a source. Whether you are one of those sources is the thing worth knowing.
Citations correlate loosely with rankings and no more than loosely. Assistants favour pages that state a claim plainly, agree with other sources and are easy to parse, which is not the same ordering Google produces — so a page you consider secondary can end up as the one quoted.
Because it varies by assistant and by phrasing, a single check tells you almost nothing. The measurement that means something is the same prompt asked repeatedly over time, across the models your buyers use, recording whether you were named and which page was credited.
Check this on your own site
- Brand Lookup
How often models mention and cite your brand
- Prompt Explorer
One prompt, four models, answers side by side
Definitions are the easy part
The free plan opens every tool with 500 credits and no card, so you can see these numbers on your own site rather than in an example.
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