citation
A source an answer engine names when composing an answer.
What citation does not show
A citation proves a document was retrieved and used once; it does not describe the model's ranking and it decays as weighting changes.
Where citation comes up on this site
- AI visibility tools compared: what each one measuresOnce access is clean and stays clean, a prompt monitor tells you what the supply side cannot: whether any of it produced a citation.
- GEO vs AEO vs LLM SEO: the terms, and what is measurableWhat is new is that there is no position to hold: an answer has a paragraph and maybe a citation, and you are used or you are not.
- Free AI visibility checkers: how to tell if one is any goodOne large free checker graded a site 99% on citation readability and, on the same report, offered to sell the fix.
- What is entity SEO? What machines must resolve to cite youA contradiction that costs a citation becomes a wrong call or a wrong booking when an agent is acting.
- How to find broken internal links and dead anchor links on your siteOpen any outbound link that fails the automated check in a browser before you remove it, and replace a genuinely dead source with an archived copy or a current equivalent rather than deleting the citation.
Terms this definition uses
Definitions that name citation
brand mention · local citation · Passage ranking · GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot · Attention · answer stability · BibTeX · RIS citation format
Related terms in Answer engines and retrieval
How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
AEO · GEO · AI visibility score · share of voice · prompt set · brand mention · RAG · grounding · training data · embedding · chunking · context window · token · hallucination · refusal · AI Overview · answer engine · retrieval · hallucinated attribution · Hybrid search · Re-ranking · Passage ranking · Query fan-out · Chunk boundary · BM25 · cross-encoder · AI Mode · information gain · dense retrieval
Questions about citation
What is citation?
A source an answer engine names when composing an answer.
What does citation not show or guarantee?
A citation proves a document was retrieved and used once; it does not describe the model's ranking and it decays as weighting changes.
Which area of the glossary does citation belong to?
Answer engines and retrieval: How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
← answer engine · retrieval →
See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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