Definition

Citation

A citation is a source the answer engine links to alongside its generated text, presented as a chip, footnote, numbered reference or side panel depending on the engine.

Citations are not ranked results. Their order rarely corresponds to relevance ranking, and the same query repeated can produce a different citation set entirely.

Counting citations alone undercounts brand presence, because engines frequently name a brand in the answer text without linking to it.

Nostimates measures citation across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Brand mention Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Collection cost Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query Competitive set llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Zero-click search Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis Position tracking White-label data