Answer engine citation

An answer engine citation is ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot quoting your site as a source in an answer.

It's becoming its own channel, distinct from ranking, because a citation can reach someone who never sees a results page.

The number I watch most closely is how many different pages of yours have been cited, alongside the total.

A site with 140 citations from 15 pages has found a couple of things worth quoting, and a site with 100 citations from 53 pages is being read broadly.

Citations go to pages that are indexed, readable as plain HTML without running JavaScript, and specific enough to be worth quoting.

An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that how often a brand is mentioned on other sites correlated more strongly with that brand being named in AI Overviews than any other factor it measured.

Tools like Ahrefs count citations across the main AI assistants, so it can be measured over time.

What this means for you

I baseline this before doing the work and read it again 4 to 6 weeks after, so the result is measured rather than asserted. A rising count of cited pages shows the new pages are being read.

This one sits under AI search.

Related terms

AI Overview

An AI Overview is the AI-written answer Google places at the top of the results page, above the normal links.

AI Mode

AI Mode is Google's fully conversational search, where the whole results page is an AI answer you can ask follow-up questions of.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed file you place on your site to tell AI models how to read it, and Google Search ignores it.

Backlink

A backlink is a link from another website to yours.

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