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Measuring AI visibility

AI citation

An AI citation is a source reference in an answer from an AI system, usually a link or footnote to the web page a statement came from. In SEO the term is mostly used for linked sources in AI answers, as opposed to a brand simply being named in the text.

How do AI citations arise?

AI search systems fetch web pages and base their answers on them. The pages show up as source links next to or below the text. For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google describes that relevant links are shown. Through query fan-out, the system issues several related searches and can link a more diverse set of pages.

Perplexity uses two bots. PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity’s search results. Perplexity-User visits pages when a person asks a question. OpenAI describes OAI-SearchBot as the bot that surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and ChatGPT-User as the bot for user-initiated actions.

Claneo points out that citations occur only when a system grounds its answer in retrieved sources. A system that answers from training data alone can name a brand without linking to anything.

Retrieval-augmented generation: retrieve first, then answerA question triggers a search in a search index or vector database. The best passages are added to the prompt together with the question. The language model writes the answer from them and points to the sources of the passages. The answer can only cite what was retrieved first.1 QUESTION2 RETRIEVAL3 CONTEXT4 ANSWERQuestionfrom a useror an appRetrievalsearch orvector search findsmatching passagesKnowledge sourcesearch index, web,vector databasePrompt with contextquestion + passages[1] passage · URL A[2] passage · URL B[3] passage · URL CLLMAnswertext withsource links[1][3]Citations point to retrieved passagesSchematic, based on Lewis et al. (2020) and Google’s grounding docs.
In retrieval-augmented generation, the system first retrieves matching passages and passes them to the language model as context. Google calls the link between model output and verifiable sources grounding. The answer can only cite what was retrieved first (an inference from the method, not a Google statement). Sources: Lewis et al. (2020): Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks (arXiv 2005.11401); Google Cloud: Grounding overview (Vertex AI); Google Cloud: Grounding with Google Search (Vertex AI).

What does it mean for websites?

A page can only be cited if the system can fetch it. That requires the page to be reachable, indexed where relevant, open to the provider’s search bot in robots.txt and readable. For Google, the documentation lists no requirements beyond the basics of Search. How often a page is cited depends on the system and the query, and it can only be measured by observation.

Example

For the question “How long does it take until a domain move is reindexed?” an AI system shows an answer and four source links below it, two documentation pages and a specialist blog. The blog receives visits through that link, although it does not rank first for the query in classic search.

FAQ

Is a citation the same as a mention? In this glossary no. A citation points to a specific source, a mention names a brand in the text.

Can I influence citations in AI answers? You can set the conditions, meaning access, indexing and clear content. A guaranteed citation does not exist.

Sources

  1. AI features and your website – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
  2. Perplexity bots – Perplexity Docsdocs.perplexity.ai
  3. OpenAI crawlers and user agents – OpenAI Docsdevelopers.openai.com
  4. AI mentions & citations – Claneo (secondary)claneo.com

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