How we measure AI citations

How a check runs

For each of your tracked keywords we send one prompt to each engine with that engine's web search turned on, and read what comes back. A citation is recorded either as a matched source URL, or as an unlinked mention of your domain in the answer text. Your dashboard shows the two separately.

The prompt is not blind. For 4 of the 5engines we name your domain and ask the model to state whether it appeared. We do not take that answer on its own: a “cited” verdict is only recorded when we can corroborate it, either by matching a returned source URL to your domain or by finding your domain in the answer text. A verdict with neither is discarded. Perplexity is different, and stricter: we send the keyword alone and match the returned source list against your domain ourselves.

Because we ask once rather than repeatedly, a citation is a single observation at a single moment. We therefore do not report variance, confidence intervals, or “cited in 2 of 3 runs”. Some engines run more than one web search internally while answering that single prompt; that is the engine's decision, not a second sample by us.

Two things on this site are not tracked measurements. An Enterprise on-demand check runs one keyword you choose, so it is a spot check rather than a site-wide reading. The free citation checker on our tools pages runs three questions we generate about the domain, on Perplexity only, and is a preview.

What the numbers mean

The citation total on your dashboard is the running count of citations we have stored for the period you are viewing, from the engine checks described above. The count behind the 90-day guarantee is produced separately: it is read directly from the engine responses at each checkpoint, over the keyword set recorded when your baseline was taken, and it is not the same figure as the dashboard total for the same window. The guarantee terms, including how subscriptions that started before 1 August 2026 are measured, are on our terms page and are authoritative.

A refusal to measure is treated as a refusal, not as a zero. If a guarantee checkpoint cannot be completed across the full set of engines and keywords your baseline used, we do not write a checkpoint and the claim goes to a person rather than being decided automatically.

The position we show is the place your source appeared within that one answer's citation list. It is not a search ranking. Sentiment is inferred from the wording of the answer, not measured.

What we cannot see

• Google's search panels. We measure Google through Gemini's grounded retrieval. We do not read the AI Overview or AI Mode panel in a Google results page. Those are separate surfaces and we do not currently measure them. Google's grounding also returns redirect-wrapped source URLs we cannot match to your domain, so for Google a citation is usually recorded as an unlinked mention rather than a matched URL.
• Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft publishes no citation API, so we never run a citation check against Copilot and it is excluded from the guarantee. Where Copilot sends a reader to your site, that visit appears in your analytics as referral traffic. It is not counted as a citation.
• Paid placements.We read each engine's own citation or grounding list. Those lists do not mark a paid placement as paid, and we do not attempt to separate them. As assistants introduce advertising, our numbers will not distinguish it from organic citation.
• What a logged-in person sees. Unless you set a measurement location for a site, we send no location, profile or memory — so those numbers are logged-out, unpersonalised numbers. Someone with assistant memory enabled, in a different country, may see a different answer to the same question. That is a real limit on any measurement of this kind, including ours.
• A negative, before August 2026. We now record every engine we asked and what it returned, so “this engine did not cite you” and “this engine was not asked” are distinguishable. That was not true of checks run before August 2026: those stored only the citations found, so for older data the two still look the same.
• Keywords beyond the checked set. A check covers up to 10 of your tracked keywords. Citations you earn for a keyword outside that set exist, and we did not look for them.