Citation Share
The share of answers on a topic that cite a given brand.
Industry Term
Full explanation
Citation share is the proportion of AI-generated answers on a given topic that cite a particular brand, relative to its competitors.
It is measured by running a fixed set of buyer questions through AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and others — multiple times each, then checking two things for every answer: did the system name a source at all, and if so, whose. Not every AI answer cites anyone; citation share only counts the answers where a source was named, and asks how often that source was you rather than a competitor.
This is what separates citation share from a simple mention count. A brand can be *mentioned* in an answer without being the source the system points to, and it can be discussed at length without ever being cited. Citation share is narrower and more useful for that reason — it measures whether a system treats a brand as evidence, not just as a topic.
Why this matters
It is a comparative measure, which makes it more useful than a raw count. Being cited less often than a competitor is the finding, not the number itself.
Example
Say you run the same buyer question through five AI systems, ten times each — fifty answers in total on that one topic. If your site is named as the source in six of them, your citation share for that question is 6 ÷ 50, or 12%. Run it again next quarter with the same method and the number becomes a trend, not a one-off snapshot.
Where this sits
Citation Share belongs to Measurement & AI Visibility, one of the seven layers of the Aingworth Glossary. How to know whether recognition is improving. Aingworth defines these plainly and does not adopt proprietary-sounding scoring language that belongs to other tools.
Related terms
Ready to see where your brand stands?
Start with the free diagnostic to see which condition of the Recognition Triangle is leaking, or read the frameworks these terms belong to.