Definition

Citation share

Citation share is the proportion of sampled AI answers for a given prompt, surface and market in which a specific brand or domain appears as a cited source. It is a rate across samples, not a rank.

Because it is a rate, citation share must be reported with a confidence interval. A share measured from a single answer carries no information about the underlying probability.

Citation share and mention share are different: a brand can be named in the answer text without any of its pages being cited, and vice versa.

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

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation 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