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What it means

When an AI assistant shows its sources, how often is one of them yours. This is the metric most often misread, because its denominator is not every answer. Most answers on most platforms carry no source links at all, and those answers are excluded. Counting them would turn the figure into a measure of how often the platform cites anything, which is not something you can influence.

How it is calculated

A response counts once no matter how many of your pages it cites. Subdomains of your domain count as yours.

Worked example

A period collects 2,140 responses. Of those, 1,840 included at least one source link, and 442 of those cited your domain.
  • Citation rate: 442 ÷ 1,840 = 24.0%
Divide by the full 2,140 instead and you get 20.7%, which is why the card’s subtitle names the real denominator: “out of N responses with source links”.
The subtitle says “links”, but the number is a count of responses. A response that cites three of your pages counts once, not three times.

Where to find it

The second KPI card on Analytics. The sources themselves, which domains and which pages and how often, are on Sources.

Citation rate is not citation share

Sources opens with a figure called citation share, and it is a different calculation: Citation share measures the platforms’ behaviour. Citation rate measures yours. They will not match, and neither is wrong.
The two are also computed from different daily rollups, so they can disagree slightly even where you would expect them to line up. If a difference matters to a decision, drill into the domain on Sources and count the responses themselves.

What moves it

Being cited is a property of your pages rather than your brand. The levers are the ones on Audit report: whether assistants are allowed to read your site, whether a page answers the question directly enough to quote, whether it carries the structure and sourcing that make it quotable. A page that ranks well in search and is never cited by an assistant is a specific, common and fixable situation. The audit calls it out as a warning rather than a pass.