Track which sources AI models cite for your brand

Citations are the URLs that AI models reference when generating responses. Tracking citations helps you understand which websites influence AI answers in your industry and whether your own site gets cited.

With Citation Sources, you can:

• See exactly which domains, hosts, and pages ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini cite when answering about your category
• Find the third-party sites you need coverage on to earn more AI citations
• Check whether a cited page actually mentions your brand in its content
• Spot pages that AI links to but that never talk about you, so you know where to pitch or publish

The page has four tabs: Overview, By Domain, By Host and By Page. Overview is the tab you land on, and it summarizes your citation data in KPI cards and charts. The other three are the Citation Sources table, which groups cited URLs by domain, by host, or by page. Each table row shows citation rate, total citations, URL count, and a per-model breakdown.

What it does

• Extracts all URLs from AI model responses (sources) and identifies which belong to your brand (citations)
• Scrapes cited pages to detect if they mention your brand in their content
• Shows a "By Page" view with cached content and brand mention detection
• Filters sources as Potentially Negative when the citing AI response is negative, or Confirmed Negative when the cited page's latest content analysis is Negative or Very negative for your brand
• Tracks citation rate, including visible and background sources

The Overview tab

Overview answers "how am I doing on citations?" before you open a single table. It shows five KPI cards, each compared against the previous period of the same length when a date range is selected:

• Total Citations: every citation in the filtered AI answers, repeated pages included
• Unique Domains: how many different domains were cited
• Unique Pages: how many different page URLs were cited
• Answer Coverage: the share of the filtered AI answers that cite at least one source
• Your Share: the share of all citations in range that point to your own domain

Below the cards there are four charts:

• Citations by AI model over time: stacked columns, one color per AI model. Periods match your tracking frequency (daily, weekly or monthly), and daily projects group by week on ranges over 60 days
• Share of citations: two donuts. The first splits every citation between your domain, your tracked competitors and all other sites. The second hides third-party sites, so you see you against your competitors alone
• Tracked brand citations over time: one line per tracked brand, with citations to your domain and to each tracked competitor
• Top domains by citation rate: the ten most cited domains, each as the share of the filtered AI answers that cite it at least once

All of it follows the filters at the top of the page, so you can read the same summary for one AI model, one country, one tag, or generic prompts only.

Sample size and partial periods

A line above the cards shows how many distinct tracked prompts and AI responses are included by the current filters.

An asterisk marks a partial period in the citations-by-model chart. This keeps a few days at the edge of the selected range, or a period still in progress, from being mistaken for a complete period.

How to use it

1. Navigate to Citations in the sidebar
2. Read the Overview tab for the headline numbers: how many citations you got, how many answers carried a source, and how much of that goes to your own domain
3. Switch to By Domain, By Host or By Page to see the table of cited URLs with position, domain, and meta title
4. Use the "Mentions you" column to see which cited pages mention your brand
5. Open a cited page, then select View Page Cache to inspect the latest stored content. The page heading also includes its favicon and an external-link button for opening the live URL
6. Filter by AI model, date range, tags, country, or language. The filters carry over when you move between tabs

When pages are re-crawled

For general web pages, each successful crawl starts a 30-day refresh interval. Repeated citations use cached content during that time, and the page is not routinely crawled again until 30 full days have passed.

Failed crawl attempts may be retried sooner. A narrowly scoped repair for corrupted crawl metadata may also refresh a page before the routine interval ends.

Tips & notes

• A citation means your URL appeared in the AI's sources. A mention means your brand name appeared in the response text. You can be mentioned without being cited, and vice versa
• Citation processing (scraping and analyzing cited URLs) can take up to 24 hours
• The "BG" badge marks a background source from the AI model's response metadata. It counts as a citation but has no visible citation position
• By Domain combines the registrable domain and all subdomains. For an exact-host rule, use By Host. For a path-prefix rule, use By Page. Citation ownership is configured separately for the project brand and each competitor. The Current Competitors table pins the project's main brand as the first highlighted row; its pencil opens the same Website and Citation scope controls used for competitors, those controls remain available from Project Settings, and changes to the main brand's Website or scope share the existing 7-day cooldown. Each competitor has its own 7-day cooldown for Website and Citation scope; changing either locks both until the date shown in the editor, while other competitor details remain editable
• High citation rate + low mention rate means AI links to your site but doesn't talk about your brand directly