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.

Why it matters

Citation rate answers the most direct version of the question a brand actually cares about: when an AI system answers a question in its category, does it name the brand as a source at all? Every other measurement in this category exists to help explain why that number moves.

Related terms

• Citation Share

  Citation share is a brand's percentage of citations within an AI answer, normalized against the total number of citation slots that answer actually contains, rather than simply counting whether a citation happened at all.

• AI Share of Voice (AI SOV)

  AI Share of Voice (AI SOV) is the percentage of AI-generated responses that mention a brand, out of all AI responses to a defined set of relevant industry queries, benchmarked against how often competitors get mentioned for the same queries.

• Citation Gap

  A citation gap is a query where a brand ranks well in traditional search results but its content is omitted or misrepresented in the AI-generated answer for that same query.