An AI citation is any time a generative AI names, quotes, or links your source in its answer. Think of it as the AI-search version of a Google ranking, except sometimes there's no link at all, just your idea in someone else's words.
There are really three flavors here: a hyperlink, a named mention (“according to Market Analyticx…”), and the quiet one, where the model paraphrases your content with zero attribution. That third one still counts as influence, you just can’t track it in a spreadsheet. Most teams track citations by running the same handful of queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews on a schedule, in fresh incognito windows, and logging who shows up. One pattern that surprises people: branded queries (your company name) get cited constantly. Unbranded, category-level queries, the ones that actually bring in new business, are brutally hard to win.
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