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AI citation vs. source URL — what counts as which

Two different signals AI engines emit, and why we treat them separately.

4 min read

When AI answers a question, two distinct things can happen:

  1. The model can cite your brand in the prose ("Vercel offers instant rollback…").
  2. The model can list a source URL that links to your domain, even if your brand name never appears in the visible text.

We track both. They're not the same signal — being cited in the sentence the user reads is a stronger position than being a footnote URL the user might click. Below is the precise distinction we use.

Vocabulary note. Earlier versions of this product called the first signal a "mention." The category has since converged on "AI citation" for that meaning — we use the new label everywhere a human reads, while the underlying database column stays is_mentioned (same boolean, same math, just a more recognisable name).

AI citation

An AI citation is your brand name or your tracked domain hostname appearing inside the AI's answer text. We detect it in two passes:

  1. Layer 1 — deterministic. A regex pass over the answer looking for your hostname (netlify.com, with or without www. and HTTPS) and your brand stem (netlify).
  2. Layer 2 — LLM classification. For each citation found, a fast classifier assigns a quality bucket: cited (40), recommended (70), or top_recommended (90). Long-tail or ambiguous cases route to a small refine call; obvious cases stay deterministic.

An AI citation sets is_mentioned: true on that scan_result. The quality bucket feeds the GEO Score (AI Visibility Score) formula.

This is the signal that rolls up into Share of Voice (the percentage of tracked prompts where your brand was cited).

Source URL

A source URL is a link to a domain that appears in the engine's structured references array (Perplexity references, Google AI Mode references) or extracted by regex from the prose (the fallback list). Each scan_result stores two source-URL fields:

  • cited_domains[] — engine-native references (preferred, higher signal). Example: Perplexity returns [{"url": "https://example.com/x", ...}, …] and we collect the hostnames.
  • competitor_mentions[] — regex fallback hits over the prose for domains not surfaced in cited_domains but listed inline.

Source URLs don't directly affect the GEO Score for the cited brand — they affect Competitor tracking. For you, the relevant signal is whether you were AI-cited (above); for competitors, the relevant signal is whether their URL appears in the engine's source list (here).

Why split the two

Different products map to different patterns:

PatternWhat you typically see
Brand-strong product (Vercel, Stripe)High AI citations, high source URLs
URL-cited-but-anonymous tool (a dev library page)Low AI citations, high source URLs
Generic page in a roundup (an "alternatives" listicle)Zero AI citations of your brand, source URL goes to listicle, not you

Treating them as one number would hide which kind of visibility you have — and the actions you take to improve are different. AI citations improve when AI knows about you (PR, bylines, brand pages). Source URLs improve when AI's preferred sources link to you (good docs, schema-marked content, guest posts on cited domains).

A practical example

Imagine your tracked domain is netlify.com — a real deployment platform we used as a stand-in for the running test scenario. Here's a snippet of an actual Google AI Mode answer for the buyer question "best deployment platform":

Vercel is the standard for Next.js and modern frontends, with Git-based preview deployments and instant rollback via immutable deployments.[1] Other strong options include Netlify[2] and Render[3].

[1] https://vercel.com/kb/guide/vercel-vs-netlify [2] https://www.netlify.com/ [3] https://render.com/docs/render-vs-vercel-comparison

For Netlify (the example tracked brand):

  • AI citation. "Netlify" appears once in prose → is_mentioned: true, quality cited (0.40) — listed in passing as one option among several, not the top recommendation.
  • Source URL. cited_domains contains netlify.com → Citation search finds this scan_result for the term netlify, and Competitor tracking attributes an AI citation event to Vercel and Render (the other deployment platforms named in the answer).

Same answer, two parallel signals.

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