Citation rate
Updated 2026-09-15
Citation rate is the share of sampled answers that cite your own domain as a source. It separates being talked about from being used as the evidence behind the answer.
How it is calculated
For each valid, grounded answer, the returned citation list is checked for your domain; citation rate is the count of answers citing it divided by all valid grounded answers. Mentions without a link do not count, and a citation of a third-party page that talks about you does not count either — the metric is about your domain being the source.
Worked example (illustrative numbers)
Of 90 grounded answers, the brand is mentioned in 21 and its own domain is linked in 7. Mention rate is 21 / 90 ≈ 0.23 and citation rate is 7 / 90 ≈ 0.08. The gap is the interesting part: the engines know the brand but mostly prefer someone else's page as the source.
Common mistakes
- Counting any citation in the answer as "our citation" when the cited page belongs to a review site or competitor.
- Expecting citation rate to track mention rate. They move independently, and the gap between them is a content-and-sourcing problem, not a measurement error.
- Comparing citation rate across engines without noting that some answers cite heavily by design and others rarely cite at all.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is our citation rate so much lower than our mention rate?
- Because engines usually cite the page that documents a claim, not the brand being discussed. Being mentioned needs the model to know you; being cited needs a page of yours to be the most convenient evidence for the sentence it is writing.
- Does a citation guarantee traffic?
- No. Most AI answers are read without a click, so a citation is best understood as attribution and trust rather than a traffic channel — which is also why click-based ROI models do not transfer to this measurement.
