{
  "slug": "ai-avg-citation-position",
  "name": "Average citation position",
  "aliases": [
    "Avg citation position"
  ],
  "definition": "Where a cited URL tends to appear in the answer's citation order, averaged over the period.",
  "category": "AI visibility",
  "type": "rank",
  "unit": "average ordinal position in the answer's citation list",
  "direction": "lower-better",
  "verification": "verified",
  "calculation": "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.",
  "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.",
  "grain": "One cited URL for one tracked segment over one date range.",
  "dimensions": [
    "cited URL",
    "competitor domain",
    "citation category",
    "prompt",
    "answer engine"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "tracker or tracked segment id",
    "date range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "ai-visibility",
    "rank-tracking"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "ai-visibility-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "ai-citation-monitoring",
    "aeo-audit",
    "competitor-deep-dive"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "ai_page_citations"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R3"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L7"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Are our pages cited first or last in AI answers?",
    "Which competitor pages sit ahead of ours in the citation list?"
  ],
  "interpretation": "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": [
    "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.",
  "failureModes": [
    "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."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "cited-page-citation-count",
      "why": "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": [
    "cited-page-citation-count",
    "ai-citation-category-mix",
    "prompt-citation-count"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}