What is a source card?
A source card is the small preview tile an answer engine shows for each source it cites, typically a favicon, the site's name, and a short excerpt, shown separately from the answer text itself.
Perplexity, Copilot, and similar products display these as a row or list alongside the written answer, one card per source, each identifying where a piece of the answer came from without requiring the reader to click through to read it.
Worth noting for anyone measuring share of voice: a source card makes a brand visibly present, name and favicon included, even when the reader never clicks it and never reads the exact sentence the answer engine actually used. That's a weaker form of citation than an inline citation, which ties a specific claim in the answer text to a specific source. Counting source-card appearances alone can overstate how much a source actually shaped the wording of the answer.
Related
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
- Mention vs citationA 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.
- Inline citationAn inline citation is a small marker, usually a number or bracket, placed directly inside an AI-generated answer's text, pointing to the specific source used for that particular sentence, as opposed to one list of sources shown after the whole answer.
- 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.
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