Citation Rate

How often AI platforms use your own website as a source for their answers.

Citation Rate measures how often AI platforms rely on your website when they answer the questions you track. It is the dashboard’s measure of your source presence, alongside Visibility, which measures your brand presence.

How it is calculated

Citation Rate = answers that used a page on your website as a source / all answers x 100

An answer counts when any page from your domain appears among its sources, whether the answer explicitly references it or only read it. An answer that used three of your pages still counts as one answer, not three.

Example

Out of 200 answers in the period, 34 used at least one page from your website.

34 / 200 x 100 = 17% Citation Rate

Citation Rate and Visibility together

Because Visibility counts only answers that name you, the two metrics can diverge:

Pattern	What it usually means
Visibility high, Citation Rate low	AI platforms know your brand from other sites: reviews, directories, articles, forums. Your own content is not shaping the answer.
Citation Rate high, Visibility low	AI platforms read your pages but recommend other brands. Your content may answer the question without making a clear case for your brand.
Both high	You are named and your own content is part of the evidence.
Both low	Start with Citations to see which sites the answers rely on.

Where you see it

• Dashboard: the Citation Rate row in the Score breakdown.
• Platform Breakdown: the citation count for each AI platform.

This metric is about your own website across all answers. The Citations page uses a different measure, also called citation rate, for individual domains and URLs. See Source metrics.

Put it to work

• Open the Citations page and select your own domain to see which of your pages get used, for which topics, and by which AI platforms.
• Pages AI platforms tend to use are those that answer a question directly: comparisons, pricing explanations, how-to guides and clear product pages. If a topic never uses your site, check whether you have a page that answers its prompts plainly.
• ChatGPT and Perplexity read only the HTML of a page, so content that appears only after scripts run is invisible to them. Google’s AI platforms (Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode) can also see content added by scripts. No AI platform can see content behind a login.