A citation is the answer presenting a URL from a brand's domain as a source, judged by deterministic URL matching.
This is the sense CiteAngle uses when it measures. The word travels with other meanings in this market, so we pin ours before it turns up in a report.
Where this lands in the measurement
Nobody reads it and decides. The address either matches or it does not, so recounting the same capture returns the same number.
The report carries the query, the run index and the address that was linked.
What it costs to leave this loose
Count citations by reading them and the same capture returns a different number depending on who read it. A figure like that cannot be audited.
The address either matches or it does not, and the query, the run index and the linked address travel with the count.
Who you want measuring this
One reading does not settle a term like this. The answer an assistant writes today can name different companies tomorrow, so a Panorama round puts 50 buyer questions to every place on our US list, 7 separate times each, and reads all 17 of them — ChatGPT · Perplexity · Claude · Gemini · Grok · Google AI Overviews · Google AI Mode · Bing Copilot · DuckDuckGo AI Assist · Google Search · Bing Search · Yahoo Search · DuckDuckGo Search · Google News · Bing News · YouTube · Google Short Videos. Radar starts at 5 questions and covers the same list under the same rule.
We put the same questions to the competitors you name inside the same runs, so you see both in one table. The conditions are sealed, so you can reproduce the round and check it, and every planned observation is published with its state, failures included. When you choose who measures this, check that all three are in place.
That describes how the measuring is done. It is not a promise about where your numbers land.
Pages that use this term
Terms worth pinning at the same time