Citation Accuracy

Citation accuracy is whether an AI system's description of a brand, in the moments it does mention or cite that brand, is actually factually correct, rather than outdated, garbled, or confused with a competitor.

Why it matters

A high citation rate isn't automatically good news if what's being cited is wrong. Citation accuracy is the check that catches a model quoting an old price, a discontinued feature, or someone else's product entirely under a brand's name.

Related terms

• Citation Rate

  Citation rate is the percentage of relevant AI-generated answers that cite a brand's domain as a source, out of every answer where citing that brand would have been relevant. It's the most commonly cited single performance metric across the GEO and AEO industry.

• Hallucination

  A hallucination is when an AI system generates a plausible-sounding but factually unsupported claim, a wrong statistic, a misattributed quote, a fabricated detail, that isn't actually backed by any of the sources it retrieved when forming its answer.