Citation Share
Citation 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.
Citation share is how often you're the named source, across your tracked questions. Where share of voice counts any mention, citation share counts only the stronger signal — being cited or linked as the source the answer was built from — which is the visibility that actually carries credit and the surviving click.
It's the sharpest AEO metric because it isolates the prize. A brand can be mentioned often yet rarely be the cited source; citation share separates the two and tells you whether your extractability and authority work is converting into real attribution. Like all AI-visibility measures it's volatile run to run, so you track it across a fixed prompt set, per engine, and watch the trend — the adaptability pillar.
Example. Across 30 tracked questions, your brand is named in 12 answers (share of voice 40%) but cited as a source in only 5 (citation share roughly 17%). The gap is your opportunity: you're in the conversation but not yet the source — a sign to strengthen the passages and authority that earn the citation.
Relevant pillar
Related terms
- Share of Voice (AI)Share of voice in AI search is the proportion of relevant AI answers in which your brand appears, measured across a fixed set of questions, as a gauge of how present you are in the conversation.
- CitationA 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.
- Prompt SetA prompt set is the fixed list of real questions you run across AI engines to measure your visibility, the stable foundation that makes citation tracking comparable over time.