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 worth watching isn't how many citations you have but how many different pages of yours have ever been cited.

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.

What earns citations is ordinary: the page has to be indexed, readable as plain HTML without running JavaScript, and specific enough to be worth quoting.

Being mentioned by name on other sites appears to help even when the mention isn't a link, and recent mentions seem to count for more than old ones.

It can be measured, which matters, because most claims made about AI visibility can't be.

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. If the number of cited pages hasn't moved, the new pages aren't 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 there is no evidence any of them do.

Backlink

A backlink is a link from another website to yours.

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