Citation Intelligence
When an AI assistant recommends the best running shoes, it often shows the pages it drew on. Citation Intelligence shows which sites and pages those are across your tracked prompts, how often you are cited, and what kinds of site the assistants lean on in your category.
What Is a Citation?
A citation is a source an AI assistant names or links in an answer. Spotlit saves the citations with each answer it captures, so you can count them across all your tracked prompts and assistants.
A citation shows a page the assistant used or showed. It does not show why the assistant chose a brand, and which pages an assistant cites changes from answer to answer. Treat the counts as a map of where to look, and read them over many answers.
Where to Find It
Open Answer Engine Insights and choose the Citations tab. Its sibling tabs are Visibility, Prompts, Query Fanouts and Platforms. A filter bar at the top narrows the numbers, and each section has an Export menu.
What the Citations Tab Shows
- Citation Share: how often your brand is cited in AI-generated answers, with a trend chart. Beside it, Citation Rank ranks your brand by how often it is cited, next to a list of the top cited domains.
- Citation Rate: the share of answers that cite your brand at least once. Citation Share counts sources; Citation Rate counts answers.
- Citation Categories: a stacked bar that splits all citations in the period by the kind of site cited.
- Top Citation Domains: the domains cited most often, each with its rank, category and share. Search for a domain by name.
- Top Citation Pages: the individual pages cited most often, with category, share and the number of retrievals behind them. The Watch button on a page adds it to your watchlist on Pages.
The Categories
Spotlit sorts every cited site into a category, so you can see what kinds of source the assistants rely on, not just which domains. The chart uses these labels:
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| You | Your own site |
| Competitor | The sites of the competitors you track |
| Brand Site | One company's own site, when it is neither yours nor a tracked competitor's |
| Editorial | Articles, news and magazine sites |
| Review Platform | Sites where people read and write reviews |
| Directory | Sites whose purpose is to list and compare providers |
| Marketplace, App Store | Sites where the product is sold or installed |
| Community, Social | Forums and social platforms where people post |
| Video | Video and podcast sites |
| Reference | Look-up sites |
| Institution, Professional | Authorities, such as schools and public bodies, and professional networks |
| Other | Citations Spotlit could not place in a category |
Using the Citation Data
These are suggestions for how to read the tab, not rules:
- Find the sources that repeat. A few domains cited across many prompts are where the assistants look first in your category.
- Check the category mix. If Editorial and Review Platform dominate, earned coverage matters more than your own pages in this category. If Community does, look at where your buyers talk.
- Compare you with the competitors. The Citation Rank list and the You and Competitor categories show how far your sites are cited against theirs.
- Watch the pages that matter. Use Watch on a page that keeps being cited, yours or anyone's, and follow it on Pages.
- Pair it with Exclusion Analysis. There, the "What they read" card shows the pages cited in the answers that left you out.
Related
- Exclusion Analysis: why answers leave you out, and the pages the assistants read
- Pages: a watchlist of the URLs you want to follow
- Competitor Benchmarking: how you compare with the brands you track
- AI Citations: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Earn Them: our blog post