What is a citation in an AI answer?
A citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
Citations are the visible half of grounding. When an engine names a brand and links a review site, that review site is a citation and it is a large part of why the brand was named.
The important consequence is that the sources you need are usually not your own. Being cited yourself is good; being present on the sources an engine already trusts in your category is what actually gets you named, because those are the documents it retrieves first.
Related
- GroundingGrounding is when a model answers using documents retrieved at the time of the question, rather than only from what it absorbed during training.
- AI visibilityAI visibility is how often, and how prominently, a brand is named by AI assistants when people ask questions in its category.
- Share of voiceShare of voice is the proportion of AI answers in a category that name your brand, relative to the competitors named alongside you.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.