Concepts
Citation
A citation is a source an AI answer attributes — a link or named domain the engine says it drew on. Citations reveal which content an engine trusts in your category, which makes them the most directly actionable signal in AI search: unlike a mention, you can go and change what sits on the cited page.
How Zebora treats them
What counts as a citation is decided by where a source came from, not by how a model chose to format its answer. That distinction matters more than it sounds: engines that render sources as inline links rather than a footnote list are easy to under-count, and doing so quietly understates the engine that may matter most to you.
Citations are concentrated
A small number of domains take a large share of citations in most categories — Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube and a handful of trade publications recur across published studies. Earning a place in that set is usually a longer programme than changing your own pages, and worth planning as one.
The same handful of domains, again
Ask assistants a category question repeatedly and the cited sources concentrate fast: an encyclopedia entry, a large forum thread, two or three trade publications, sometimes a video. A brand's own site rarely appears. That is why citation work is usually a programme of earning a place in those sources rather than a pass over your own pages.
Related terms
- Mention — Being named in the answer, which can happen with no citation at all.
- Answer engine — Some retrieve and cite; some answer from memory and cite nothing.
- Entity — Being understood as a thing is what gets you cited as a source about it.
Last reviewed . Definitions are reviewed quarterly, and whenever the underlying measurement changes.
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