Tracking Citation Sources
Core Analytics
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.
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
- Tracks citation rate (percentage of responses that cite your domain)
How to use it
- Navigate to Citations (Sources) in the sidebar
- View the sources table showing all cited URLs with position, domain, and meta title
- Use the "Mentions you" column to see which cited pages mention your brand
- Click a source URL to see the cached content with brand mention highlights
- Filter by AI model, date range, tags, country, or language
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 indicates background sources — these are supplementary citations that appeared in the response metadata
- High citation rate + low mention rate means AI links to your site but doesn't talk about your brand directly