Citation rate
Also known as: AI citation rate, Source citation rate
Citation rate is a metric used to measure AI visibility: the percentage of answers that AI assistants give to a fixed set of questions in which a given website or brand is cited as a source.
In classic search, the question is “what position are we in?”. AI answers don’t have positions; you’re either cited as a source or you aren’t. Citation rate turns that into a number.
How it’s calculated
There’s no single industry-standard definition yet. A common approach:
- Build a fixed set of realistic questions your customers might ask.
- Put those questions to the AI assistants you’ve chosen.
- Count the answers that cite your site as a source.
Citation rate = answers citing your site / total answers × 100
Worked example
This is an illustrative example. A set of 25 questions is asked to two assistants, giving 50 answers. Your site is linked as a source in 9 of them. Your citation rate is 9 / 50 × 100 = 18%.
Things to watch
- Language models don’t give the same answer every time. A single run can mislead; asking each question several times and averaging is more reliable.
- If you change the question set, the numbers stop being comparable.
- Being mentioned by name and being cited as a source aren’t the same thing, so count them separately. For how often a brand is mentioned relative to competitors, look at share of voice.
We track this rate monthly against the same question set. Our guide on how to measure AI visibility covers the method in detail.