{
  "slug": "ai-citation-rate",
  "name": "AI citation rate",
  "aliases": [
    "Citation rate",
    "Citation %",
    "Citation percentage"
  ],
  "definition": "Your share of all the citations answer engines awarded across the tracked competitor set for a prompt basket, your citations as a percentage of every tracked domain's citations, not the proportion of answers that cited you.",
  "category": "AI visibility",
  "type": "share",
  "unit": "percent of all tracked domains' answer-engine citations",
  "direction": "higher-better",
  "verification": "verified",
  "calculation": "(your citations / all tracked domains' citations) × 100, computed by the semantic layer on every AI-visibility source. The product labels it a citation market share of tracked demand in answer engines, and the drilldown sources label the identical formula \"Citation Share %\", it is a share, not a rate of inclusion.",
  "numerator": "Citations of your domain in answer-engine responses in the slice.",
  "denominator": "Citations of every tracked domain, you and the tracked competitors, in the same slice.",
  "aggregation": "Never average the per-platform percentages to get the cross-platform figure. The verbs run the summary dataset twice, once grouped by answer engine for the rows, once measure-only so the semantic layer re-aggregates the ratio, and the second read is the number reported as overall.",
  "grain": "One answer engine (or the cross-engine overall) for one tracked segment over one date range.",
  "dimensions": [
    "answer engine",
    "intent",
    "branded vs non-branded",
    "country",
    "device",
    "competitor domain"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "tracker (unified segment id) for segment-scoped reads",
    "date range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "ai-visibility"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "ai-visibility-report",
    "monthly-executive-search-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "ai-visibility-pulse",
    "aeo-audit",
    "ai-citation-monitoring",
    "search-pulse",
    "ai-vs-traditional-gap",
    "quattr-iq"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "ai_visibility_citation_audit",
    "ai_visibility_overview",
    "ai_visibility_trend",
    "ai_visibility_drilldown",
    "ai_visibility_competitors"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R3"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L7"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "How often does ChatGPT cite us?",
    "Is our citation rate rising or falling?",
    "Which answer engine cites us least?"
  ],
  "interpretation": "Read it per engine before reading it blended, engines differ enough that one weak engine can hide inside a healthy overall. Because the denominator is the tracked roster, it moves when a competitor gains or loses citations even if yours are flat. A move at low citation counts is direction, not a result.",
  "caveats": [
    "The name says rate; the formula is a share. It does not answer \"what fraction of answers cited us\", it answers \"what fraction of the tracked set's citations were ours\", so it falls when a rival gains even if your own citations hold.",
    "The denominator is the tracked competitor set, not every domain an engine could cite. An untracked domain taking citations does not appear in it.",
    "Answer-engine citations and Google's on-SERP AI Overviews are different surfaces, on different datasets, measured separately and never rolled together.",
    "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.",
    "Engines are non-deterministic: the same prompt can answer differently twice, which is why this is reported as a rate over repeated observation rather than as a state.",
    "The answer-engine filter keys on the platform key (\"chatgpt\", \"gemini\"), not the display name; filtering the display dimension with a key returns no rows.",
    "Where a period-over-period comparison is attached, the delta percentage is returned as a fraction by the shared comparison helper and as a percentage by the significance verbs, check which one a card is rendering."
  ],
  "freshness": "~1 day behind, Daily prompt runs, available the following day.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Reading it as an inclusion rate, \"engines cite us in 12% of answers\", when it is a share of the tracked set's citations.",
    "Reading a blended cross-engine figure as if it described every engine.",
    "Treating a week-over-week move at single-digit citation counts as a trend.",
    "Assuming an empty result means zero citations when it means the tracker, segment or platform filter did not bind."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "ai-mention-share",
      "why": "Same denominator family, different behaviour counted. A citation is your URL used as a source of the answer; a mention is your brand named in the answer text. A majority of citations produce no mention, so the two shares diverge routinely."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ai-share-of-voice",
      "why": "Both are shares against the same tracked set, over different numerators. This one counts citations only; share of voice adds mentions at a weight of 1 against a citation's 1.25 and divides by the same weighted total. A rising citation share can sit beside a flat share of voice when mentions moved the other way."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ai-overview-inclusion",
      "why": "Different surfaces entirely. This is an answer engine citing your URL as a source; AI Overview inclusion is Google's on-SERP answer box, measured on a separate dataset. Every AI-visibility verb opens its description by disclaiming the swap."
    },
    {
      "slug": "prompt-citation-share",
      "why": "Same ratio at two grains, and they do not decompose into each other: the prompt-level figure divides within one prompt, the account-level figure divides across the whole slice. A prompt where you hold every citation can sit inside a slice where you hold very few.",
      "mirroredFrom": "prompt-citation-share"
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "ai-citation-count",
    "ai-share-of-voice",
    "ai-mention-share",
    "prompt-citation-share",
    "cited-page-citation-count"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}