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Citation intelligence

When AI recommends a competitor, one website is often the reason.

An answer is assembled from sources. Until you know which pages the model drew on, every fix is a guess. The most common one, publishing more content on your own domain, is frequently the wrong move.

Get a free snapshot of one clientSee AI search visibility
  • Sampled answers, annotated
  • Source influence by domain
  • Client, competitor and third-party split

The mechanism

Where an answer actually comes from.

Four steps, none of them mysterious. Most of the confusion about AI search disappears once an agency can see this sequence written down.

01The questionSomeone asks in their own words. There is no keyword, and no two people phrase it identically.
02RetrievalThe engine gathers candidate sources: pages it can reach, trusts and considers relevant to that phrasing.
03AssemblyIt writes one answer from what it gathered, naming whichever companies those sources named.
04AttributionSome engines link the sources they used. Where they do, the pages that decided the answer are observable.

Citation intelligence

See which websites AI trusted when it answered about your client.

An answer is assembled from sources. Knowing which pages the model drew on is the difference between guessing at a fix and briefing one.

Sampled answerChatGPT · 09:14

Prompt: “What is the best accounting software for small businesses?”

For a small business with fewer than 25 employees, Alder Accounting is frequently recommended for its bank reconciliation and payroll add-on1. Reviewers note that Ledgerly has a lower entry price but limited multi-entity support2, while Countway is generally positioned at businesses with in-house finance teams3.

Client named
Yes
Position
#1 of 3
Cited as source
Yes
  • 1alderaccounting.example/payroll-integration
  • 2accountingreview.example/ledgerly-review
  • 3countway.example/who-we-serve
  • Client
  • Competitor
  • Cited source
Sources influencing this categoryDemo data
  • alderaccounting.exampleClient
    18%34 cited+12%
  • ledgerly.exampleRival
    14%27 cited+4%
  • accountingreview.exampleReview
    10%19 cited+21%
  • smallbizforum.exampleForum
    8%16 cited−6%
  • financeweekly.examplePress
    7%14 cited+9%
  • countway.exampleRival
    6%11 cited−2%

When a review site outranks your client’s own domain as a source, the fix is rarely another blog post.

The response

Three kinds of fix, depending on who owns the source.

Each case needs a different fix, and two of them need no new content at all.

01

The source is yours

The client’s own page is already cited. The work is to defend it: keep it current, keep it specific, and make sure the claims a model would quote are still the accurate ones.

02

The source belongs to someone else

A review site or an editorial page is carrying the category. Publishing a competing blog post does not touch that. Getting the client accurately represented on the cited source does.

03

There is no source at all

Nothing on the client’s site answers the question in a form anything could quote. This is the most common finding, and usually the cheapest to fix.

Keep reading

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