What is Citation Share?
Citation share is the share of AI answers, across a set of relevant buyer questions, that cite your domain as a source. If assistants answer 100 questions about your category and your site is cited in 12 of them, your citation share is 12 percent. It is the evidence-level counterpart to mention rate.
Why citations beat mentions for durability
A mention means the model named you. A citation means the model relied on your page to construct its answer. Cited sources survive model updates better, because the retrieval layer keeps finding and trusting the same pages even as the generation model changes.
How to grow it
- Publish original data and verifiable facts worth citing
- Answer specific questions directly, in liftable sentences
- Earn references on the third-party surfaces models already cite
- Keep pages crawlable for retrieval bots and fast to load