Four market terms, one precise data model
The categories stay familiar to buyers while the underlying evidence remains stage-specific and decision-ready.
Seven states from collection quality to business outcome
Every state has an independent verifier. The chain shows exactly where visibility converts—and where the next intervention belongs.
STATE 01
Measurement failure
Timeout · 403/429 · provider · capture or parse error
Report against all attempts; exclude from visibility denominators.
STATE 02
Answer surface
Target AI surface shown or not shown after a valid search
Keep surface non-appearance separate from brand absence.
STATE 03
Brand absent or mentioned
Approved company, brand and product aliases in answer text
Judge role only within appeared, evaluable surfaces.
STATE 04
Target citation
Customer canonical URL appears as a visible source link
Record citation independently from a brand-name mention.
STATE 05
Direct source support
Verifiable link between an answer claim and a source evidence span
Separate source-panel inclusion from claim-level support.
STATE 06
Verified referral
Referrer · UTM · landing log identifies the session
Preserve displayed citations and referred visits in separate ledgers.
STATE 07
Business outcome
Consented analytics · CRM · payment evidence for leads, signups, purchases and revenue
Connect outcomes through a preregistered evaluation.
Visible denominators make the next move obvious
| Metric | Denominator | Quality rule |
|---|---|---|
| Failure rate | failed runs ÷ all attempts | Keep failure reason as a quality KPI |
| Surface rate | surface shown ÷ applicable valid runs | Exclude failed and not-applicable runs |
| Brand mention rate | brand mentioned ÷ mention-evaluable shown surfaces | Exclude alias-judgment errors |
| Target citation rate | target URL cited ÷ citation-evaluable shown surfaces | Exclude surfaces that were not shown |
| Direct support rate | direct support ÷ span-evaluable shown surfaces | Exclude inaccessible source text |
| Referral conversion | verified conversions ÷ verified referred sessions | Exclude unattributed conversions |
Owned platform aggregates and controlled observations stay side by side
They answer different questions about different populations. Preserving both delivers market-level evidence and query-level diagnosis without a blended score.
Customer-owned · Google
Search Console generative AI report
Where Google makes the report available, connect AI Overviews and AI Mode link impressions by page, country, date and device. Report unavailability is not zero exposure; keep the breakout distinct from overlapping Web performance.
Customer-owned · Microsoft
Bing AI Performance
Read visible citations, cited pages and sampled grouped grounding queries. Join clicks, rank and revenue from their own sources.
Controlled observation
OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity runs
Freeze question, market, language, time and raw response at run level. Keep these request samples distinct from publisher-wide user exposure.
Customer-owned · Outcomes
GA4, CRM and payment records
Connect AI Assistants and Organic Search sessions to enquiries, signups and purchases with attribution and data-quality receipts.
Separate current automation from the publishing activation gate
Current automated execution stops at diagnosis, evidence-bound recommendations, drafts and remeasurement; automated publishing is not enabled. Every control below is required before a future customer-authorised publishing connection can be activated. External editorial decisions stay with accountable specialists.
Automated
Diagnosis, recommendation and draft
- Public technical audit and delegated read-only evidence
- Repeated collection, error classification and state judgment
- Evidence-bound page diffs and content briefs
- Reporting, remeasurement scheduling and evaluation
Customer approval
Future owned-site publishing activation gate
- Automated publishing currently disabled
- Exact URL, section and diff-hash authorization
- Pre-publish snapshot and remote version or ETag
- Independent verifier and limited canary
- Live checks, rollback and restored-hash receipt
Accountable specialist
External and high-risk work
- Third-party editorial, PR, reviews and partner negotiation
- Legal, medical, financial and pricing fact review
- Global robots, CDN or WAF changes and domain migrations
- Consumer surfaces without an approved collection route
Use FAQ for clarity; evaluate performance with observed evidence
FAQ remains a useful editorial format for real buyer questions. Google stopped showing the FAQ rich result on May 7, 2026, so CiteAngle treats FAQ schema as semantic hygiene rather than an AI-visibility boost.
Primary sources
Accessed July 14, 2026. Platform documentation and standards are mapped directly to the claims above.
- Google guide to generative AI search optimisationGenerative Search uses SEO foundations; special AI schema and artificial chunking are not prerequisites
- Google Search Console generative AI reportAI Overviews and AI Mode link impressions, dimensions and reporting limits
- Google Search documentation updatesFAQ rich-result retirement from May 7, 2026
- Bing AI PerformanceVisible citations, cited pages, grounding queries and representative-sample scope
- OpenAI crawler overviewSeparate search, training and user-request crawler roles
- Anthropic Web Search ToolRequest-level URLs, titles, cited text and error handling
- Perplexity crawlersSeparate search crawler and user-request fetch roles
- RFC 9309Robots Exclusion Protocol semantics