Citation rate

Citation rate is the share of sampled AI answers in which a site is linked as a source. We measure it on a fixed prompt set, per engine, over several runs of each prompt, and report it with the spread across runs rather than as a single number.

How it is calculated

For each prompt and engine, run the prompt several times in a logged-out session and record whether the answer cites the site (and which URL). The citation rate for an engine is cited answers divided by all answers for that engine; a range across runs shows how stable it is. Our Lab publishes a 44-prompt set, three runs per prompt, monthly.

Citation versus mention

A mention is the site or company being named in the answer text. A citation is a link to a page. An answer can mention a company without citing it, and cite a page without naming the company. We record both.

Why sampling

No engine publishes a complete site-level citation report. Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report and Search Console’s Generative AI performance report give partial data for Copilot and Google respectively; for the rest, sampling is the only way to get a number that can be tracked month to month. Small samples move for no reason, which is why we show ranges.