AI Citation
An AI citation is a single instance of an AI assistant mentioning a brand by name (or linking to its content) in a generated answer — the unit of measurement that AEO platforms aggregate into visibility scores.
Why it matters
Citations are the atomic event of AI visibility — they're either present in an answer or they aren't. Counting and analysing them across a prompt set is what turns 'AI is changing search' into a measurable, trackable, improvable channel.
Two flavours of citation
- Mention citation — the AI names your brand in the answer text without necessarily linking to your domain. Common in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
- Link citation — the AI explicitly links to a page on your domain as a source. More common in Perplexity, AI Overviews, and ChatGPT with browsing enabled.
Both count for AEO purposes, but they tell different stories: a mention without a link signals the AI knows about you; a link signals it's actively quoting one of your pages.
What to track per citation
- Engine — which AI assistant produced the citation.
- Prompt — the exact query that surfaced it.
- Position — first mention, third, etc., in the answer.
- Sentiment — positive, neutral, or negative framing.
- Source domain — if a link, which page.
Why per-engine variation matters
The same brand often has very different citation rates across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot for identical prompts. Each engine pulls from different sources, weights signals differently, and updates on different schedules — so AEO work needs per-engine measurement, not a single composite score.
Related terms
