{
  "slug": "ai-citation-category-mix",
  "name": "Citation category mix",
  "aliases": [
    "Cited URL categories",
    "Citation category breakdown"
  ],
  "definition": "The Citation Category summary on the cited-URL drilldown: your citations grouped by a category attached to the cited page, with each group's percentage of the slice.",
  "category": "AI visibility",
  "type": "share",
  "unit": "percent of your citations in the slice",
  "direction": "neutral",
  "verification": "review",
  "aggregation": "The percentages complete the slice, so they are read together; a single group's figure means little without the mix beside it.",
  "grain": "One citation category within one tracked segment, date range and cited-URL slice.",
  "dimensions": [
    "citation category",
    "answer engine",
    "intent",
    "branded vs non-branded",
    "country",
    "device"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "tracker (unified segment id)",
    "date range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "ai-visibility",
    "rank-tracking"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "ai-visibility-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "aeo-audit",
    "ai-citation-monitoring",
    "ai-prompt-coverage-gaps"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "ai_visibility_drilldown"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R3"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L7",
    "L3"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What kind of pages do AI answers cite us for?",
    "Are we cited for documentation or for comparisons?"
  ],
  "caveats": [
    "Which taxonomy this actually is has not been settled. The surface advertises citation types, blog, comparison, product, documentation, but the verb reads the generic content-category dimension, while a purpose-built citation-category dimension with exactly that taxonomy exists beside it and is not read.",
    "The category field is not populated for every slice; when it comes back empty across the board the summary is omitted with a stated reason rather than shown as zeros.",
    "A transient failure to fetch the category summary is reported separately from the category not being live at all, and neither affects the cited-URL rows in the same response.",
    "Categories describe an attribute of the page; they are not a statement about why the engine chose it.",
    "Every figure is scoped to a tracked prompt basket, a sample, not a census, so the basket's coverage belongs beside the number it produced."
  ],
  "freshness": "~1 day behind, Daily prompt runs, available the following day.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Reading an omitted summary as an even split or as zero citations.",
    "Treating a transient failure of the category leg as evidence the field does not exist.",
    "Briefing content work off group labels before it is settled which taxonomy produced them."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "cited-page-citation-count",
      "why": "The mix is a distribution over page groups; the page count is the citation total for one URL. The mix can shift with no change in total citations, and unlike the page count, which taxonomy the mix uses is still under review."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ai-referral-source-split",
      "why": "Two compositions that both carry the word AI, over different populations on different datasets. This divides your citations across content categories inside a tracked prompt basket at R3; the referral source split divides arriving sessions across referring assistants in web analytics at R5. No row in one corresponds to a row in the other, and neither is a view of the other.",
      "mirroredFrom": "ai-referral-source-split"
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "cited-page-citation-count",
    "ai-avg-citation-position",
    "ai-citation-count",
    "ai-referral-source-split"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}