What is the difference between a mention and a citation?
A mention is the model naming you in its answer. A citation is the model linking a source. You can have either without the other, and they mean different things.
A mention without a citation means the model knows you from training or from many sources and is stating it as general knowledge. That is durable but unattributed, and it sends no traffic. A citation without a mention means your page was used as a source for a claim that did not name you.
Conflating them makes a score meaningless. Being named in the recommendation is the commercial outcome; being cited is the traffic outcome; tools that report a single blended figure are adding two different things.
Related
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
- 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.
- AI visibilityAI visibility is how often, and how prominently, a brand is named by AI assistants when people ask questions in its category.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.