A citation is when an AI system uses your page as a source for its answer and links to it. It is distinct from a mention, which is when the system names your business without linking to you.
Mention and citation are not the same outcome
A mention is a recommendation: the assistant said your name. That has genuine value, because the person may well go and search for you afterwards, and being named as one of three options in your market is a good place to be.
A citation sends a click. Your page is the source, it is linked, and someone can follow it. It is the closer analogue to a ranking, and it is the one that shows up in your analytics.
Tracking both separately is worth the effort because the gap between them is diagnostic. High mentions and low citations usually means the assistant knows about you from other people writing about you, rather than from your own pages, and the fix for that is different from the fix for being invisible altogether.
What tends to get cited
Pages that answer one specific question clearly, and can be quoted without the surrounding paragraph. Pages with facts, figures and dates, since these are what an answer needs and what a vague page cannot supply. Pages that look maintained, because a source that was last updated four years ago is a risk to quote.
Original material also travels further than summaries. A system assembling an answer has no reason to cite your restatement of something when it can cite the thing you restated.
The source list is the most actionable thing in AI tracking
When you record which sources an answer was built from, across a set of questions in your market, the same domains keep reappearing. An industry publication, a directory, a comparison site, a forum thread.
That is a link target list assembled from evidence rather than guesswork, and it is unusually direct. These are the pages the answers about your market are made of. Being present, accurate and current on them is one of the more reliable routes into those answers.
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Mention rate
Mention rate is the share of AI answers, on a set of questions you choose, in which your business is named. Measured over time and across platforms, it is the closest thing AI search has to a ranking.
AI Overview
An AI Overview is the AI-generated answer Google places above the ordinary search results for many queries. It answers the question on the results page, citing a handful of sources, which means a share of searchers never click through to any website at all.
AEO
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is the work of getting your business named and cited when an AI system answers a question, rather than merely ranking on a page of links. The name is new; a good deal of the work is not.
Agent readiness
Agent readiness is a score for how well AI systems can find, fetch and make sense of your website. It covers discoverability, crawler access, machine-readable content and agent capabilities, and it is the first thing to check when you are missing from AI answers.