Source citation

When an AI assistant answers with the web, it usually shows where it looked. Those links are source citations. They are the only part of an AI answer that points at a specific page, which makes them the most direct evidence of what the engine actually read.

What counts as a source citation?

One URL the engine attached to its answer. It might appear as a numbered footnote, a sources panel, an inline link or a card under the answer, depending on the engine. Attensira normalises all of them to the same object: a URL, attributed to the domain it belongs to.

Three objects are worth keeping apart, because confusing them is the most common misreading of AI visibility data:

• Mention

  What it is

  Your brand named in the answer text

  Counted as

  One per answer

• Citation

  What it is

  One URL the answer linked

  Counted as

  One per URL

• Source

  What it is

  A domain, gathering many citations

  Counted as

  One per domain

How is citation rate calculated?

citation rate = answers linking your own domain
÷ all successful answers in the window

An answer that links four of your pages counts once toward the rate. The four URLs still count individually on the page-level view. An answer with no links at all still counts in the denominator: a linkless answer is a real answer and a real absence of a citation.

Where do the citations in real answers point?

We read our own category the way we would read yours: the 61 questions Attensira tracks, asked of ChatGPT and Perplexity every day, and every link the answers carried in the 30 days to 4 October 2026, read over the Attensira MCP. Of the 100,380 citations, 74.6% pointed to third-party sites, 14.3% to tracked competitors' own sites, 8.4% to AI platforms' own help and docs and 1.6% to our own sites.

The same read shows that being named and being read are separate events. ChatGPT linked attensira.com in 6.6% of its 2,349 answers but named Attensira in only 4.2%. It reads our pricing and comparison pages for facts, then recommends other products. On Perplexity the gap ran the other way: linked in 3.9% of 2,175 answers, named in 4.5%. Reference rate covers why we keep those two rates apart.

What decides which page gets cited?

ChatGPT's own account, in its answer of 3 October 2026 to "how does AI pick which sources to cite", splits it into two decisions: which pages to retrieve, and which of those to attach to a claim. In practice the engine searches, ranks the results, reads some of them and writes. A page has to clear every step:

1. It can be fetched. The engine's search crawler is allowed by robots.txt and gets server-rendered HTML.
2. It is retrieved for the question. Usually through the engine's own index or a search partner, which is where classic SEO still matters.
3. A passage answers the question on its own. The engine lifts passages, not pages.
4. Other sources agree. An engine prefers a claim several pages make.

Attensira ranks the pages that decide each answer by citation share times position, not by raw count, because a page linked first in every answer decided more than one linked last in a few.

What do people get wrong about citations?

• Counting clicks as the payoff. Almost nobody clicks the links inside Google's AI summaries; see zero-click search for the measured rates. The citation shapes the answer the reader acts on; the click is a bonus.
• Treating the link as proof of accuracy. The sentence above a correct link can still be wrong. Read the answer and the source together.
• Reading average position as a rank. Position is where a URL sat in one answer's list of links, averaged per domain. It is not a ranking of your brand.
• Optimising for citations where you are never named. If engines do not consider you part of the answer, a more citable page will not change that. Fix the mention first.

How do you track your own?

Attensira reads every answer daily, stores the full text and its links in order, and reports citation rate per engine beside share of voice, each with its sample size. The citation tracking view lists which of your pages are cited and for which questions; win this answer lists the pages that decide each question and whether you are on them.