Citation
A citation in AI search is when an answer engine credits your page as a source for its response, usually as a linked reference, making it the surviving path to your site in a zero-click answer.
Also known as: source link, AI citation
A citation is the engine pointing back at you as a source. When an AI answer links or names your page as where a claim came from, that's a citation — and in a world where the answer itself often satisfies the user without a click, the citation is the prize: the visibility, the credit, and the one remaining route a reader has to reach you.
Citations are won at two levels. First your passage has to be extractable enough to be the one the engine grounds its answer in; then, when several sources could serve equally well, the engine leans on authority — the off-site trust signals — to pick which to credit. Earning citations is therefore the combined output of writing the quotable passage and being a source the web already vouches for.
Example. Ask Perplexity a question and the little numbered superscripts in the answer are citations; click one and it opens the source page. Being one of those numbers, consistently, across your target questions is what AEO is optimizing for.
Relevant pillars
Related terms
- Citation ShareCitation share is the percentage of AI answers to your target questions in which your site is specifically cited as a source, the strictest measure of whether you're winning the citation, not just being mentioned.
- GroundingGrounding is the practice of tying an AI model's answer to specific retrieved sources, so the response reflects real documents rather than the model's unverified internal memory.
- Branded MentionA branded mention is any reference to your brand name across the web, linked or not, that helps AI systems recognize you as a known entity and weigh how often and how favorably you're discussed.