Average citation position
also called Avg citation position
Definition
Where a cited URL tends to appear in the answer's citation order, averaged over the period.
How it's calculated
The arithmetic mean of the citation-position value across the cited-URL rows in the slice, a plain average of an ordinal, with no weighting by citation count.
Scope, grain and dimensions
- Grain
- One cited URL for one tracked segment over one date range.
- Dimensions
- cited URL · competitor domain · citation category · prompt · answer engine
- Required filters
- tracker or tracked segment id · date range
- Aggregation
- An average already, never sum it. Averaging two of these without their citation counts as weights is wrong, and the measure itself does not carry that weighting.
- Metric type
- rank · average ordinal position in the answer's citation list
Data sources
Where you'll see this
Named reports that normally include this metric.
Skills and analyses that use it
Skills carry the judgment; the analysis verbs do the reading.
Analysis verbs
ai_page_citations
Method rungs and levers
A rung tells you what a movement here can and cannot explain, read the rungs below it first.
levers L7 AI-answer visibility
Ask Quattr
- "Are our pages cited first or last in AI answers?" Simulate this →
- "Which competitor pages sit ahead of ours in the citation list?" Simulate this →
How to read it
Read beside the citation count for the same URL: a page cited often but late is a different situation from one cited rarely but first. Position is ordinal, so a change of half a place is not a magnitude.
Caveats, freshness and failure modes
It averages an ordinal, so the arithmetic is exact but the distances are not meaningful: the gap between slot 1 and 2 is not the same quantity as the gap between 8 and 9.
Direction is not asserted by the semantic layer. Lower-is-better here comes from a name-based rule that treats anything containing "position" as lower-better, a sound convention for this field, but a convention rather than a pinned claim.
Only rows carrying a cited URL contribute, so the average describes cited pages rather than the answer as a whole.
Engines are non-deterministic: the same prompt can answer differently twice, so the average is over repeated observation rather than a stable placement.
- Freshness
- ~1 day behind, Daily prompt runs, available the following day.
Common failure modes
- Treating a move from 3.4 to 2.9 as an improvement of half a citation slot rather than a small ordinal shift.
- Averaging positions across pages without weighting by citations.
Not the same as
The confusions that cause the most wrong decisions.
Average citation position Citations per cited page Compare definitions →
How often a page is cited and where it sits when cited are separate readings, a page can hold the top slot on one prompt and be absent everywhere else.
Related metrics and workflows
Verification
A definition is the smallest part of this.
The measurement matters because something acts on it. Here is the rest of the showcase, in the order most people find useful.