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Citation tracking

AI citation tracking: find the pages AI reads, and get onto them

An assistant recommends whoever the pages it reads recommend. We record every cited URL for every prompt, rank the sites that keep appearing, flag the ones that name your competitors and not you, and catch the answers that cite your page while naming somebody else. That list is where to get onto next.

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Two questions, four outcomes

Cited and named are two different questions

Most tools collapse these. The four combinations need four different responses, and only one of them is the place you want every prompt to end up. The most common surprise, cited but not named, has a diagnosis of its own.

  • Your page citedYour brand named

    Cited and named

    Your page is a source and your brand is in the prose. The outcome you are working toward.

  • Your page citedYour brand named

    Cited, not named

    You briefed the answer and a competitor got the credit. Retrieval without framing.

  • Your page citedYour brand named

    Named, not cited

    The assistant knows you without reading you today. Durable, and harder to influence.

  • Your page citedYour brand named

    Neither

    You are outside the conversation on this prompt. The domains cited instead tell you where to start.

The awkward finding

The pages describing you are mostly not yours

Run this for a week and the pattern is usually the same: most of the sites the engines read are review sites, comparison posts and forum threads, not vendor sites. Which means the description an assistant gives of your product is assembled largely from pages you do not control. Seeing the ranked list is uncomfortable, and it is also the most useful list you will get: the sites that name your rivals and not you are the ones to get onto, and they are where a recurring criticism usually turns out to live.

Every URL, every answer.
The full citation list per answer, not a sample, with rank and domain.
Domains ranked.
Who briefs your category most often, across all six engines.
The answer kept too.
Check whether the cited page actually supports the claim made about you.

Citations versus rankings

AI citation analysis: why a citation is not a ranking

A cited page is not a ranked page, and optimising for one does not reliably get you the other.

A search resultA citation panel
What it isA ranked list of documents.The pages a model consulted while writing prose.
OrderPositional, and the position is the point.The order the engine returned them in, which is not a position.
StabilityReasonably stable from one day to the next.Regenerated every time the question is asked.
Read it asA leaderboard.Evidence of what shaped the answer.

A page can be cited constantly and rank nowhere, or rank first and never be cited. Treating a citation panel as a leaderboard produces confident, wrong conclusions.

Google's AI Overviews make this especially visible, which is why AI Overview tracking reports the citation panel separately from the prose, and why AI visibility tracking reports a rate rather than a position. Our methodology sets out what the AI mention tracking platform will and will not infer from a citation.

No citation rank invented.
We record the order the engine returned and do not dress it up as a position.
Absent citations recorded as absent.
An engine that cited nothing is not an engine that cited you.
Everything stored.
Answers and citations kept from your first day, so you can re-read them later.

Before you build a plan around AI citation tracking

If something here is unclear, ask us before you sign up rather than after.

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What is AI citation tracking?
Recording which web pages an assistant reads and links to when it answers a question. Those sources are the raw material of the answer, so the pages being cited are the pages deciding who gets recommended in your category. Find the ones that name your competitors and not you, and you have a list of places to get onto.
Can my site be cited without my brand being named?
Yes, and it is more common than people expect. The citation panel and the answer text are separate. An assistant can read your page, use what it learned, and then name a competitor in the sentence the buyer actually reads. You have the retrieval and not the framing, and we report it as its own state because the fix is different.
Which domains get cited most in my category?
You will usually find it is not the vendors. Review sites, comparison posts, forum threads and documentation tend to dominate citation panels, which means the pages deciding how you are described are frequently not pages you own. We rank the domains so you can see who is actually briefing the model.
Do all engines show their sources?
Not equally. Engines that browse the live web cite heavily; ones answering from training data may cite nothing at all. We record what each engine actually returns rather than inferring sources it did not give, and the platform pages say what to expect from each.
How do I use this to get cited more?
Start with the sites flagged on the Sources screen: the ones the engines read that name your competitors and not you. Work on being represented on those pages, then watch the re-checks on the prompts where they were cited. If three comparison sites brief every answer in your category, being accurately described on those three matters more than another post on your own blog. The guide to getting cited walks through it.
Is the full answer kept alongside the citations?
Yes. Every answer is stored in full with its citation list, and you can open any answer to read the two side by side. That is what lets you check whether a citation actually supported the claim made about you, or whether the assistant cited a page and then said something the page does not say.

Related reading

The rest of what we measure

Six more, all on every plan.

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Find the sites to get onto first

Add your prompts and read the first citation lists within minutes, with the sites that name your competitors and not you flagged.

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On every plan

  • Every answer stored in full, with its citations.
  • Every rate shown with the number of checks behind it.
  • Cited-but-not-named reported as its own state.