How to track AI citations
Tracking AI citations means running a fixed set of buyer questions against the major models on a schedule and recording three things each time: whether you were mentioned, whether your URL was cited, and who took the slot when you were not. Anything less — checking manually, occasionally, in your own logged-in account — produces numbers you cannot act on.
Why one-off checks mislead
Model answers are non-deterministic. The same question asked twice can produce different sources. Personalisation and chat memory skew results towards brands you have discussed before, which is why founders checking their own brand almost always get a flattering answer.
Run the same question ten times and you will typically see your brand in some proportion of them. That proportion is the real metric, and you cannot see it from a single check.
Designing the probe set
Aim for 20 to 40 questions across four types: category questions, comparison questions, problem questions, and brand-name control questions. Write them in the buyer's language. Freeze the list — the value is in the trend, and changing questions resets it.
Run each question against every model that matters, in a clean context with no chat history, and record the full answer text plus the cited URLs.
What to record
Mention (was the brand named), citation (was our URL in the sources), sentiment or accuracy of the description, and the competitor set that appeared. Store the raw answer, because six weeks later you will want to know how the description changed, not just whether it existed.
Aggregate weekly. Daily aggregation is noise.
Turning it into action
Sort by the questions where you are consistently absent and a competitor is consistently present. That list, in order, is your content plan — each line names a page that needs to exist or needs to be rewritten.
Re-probe two weeks after each fix. If retrieval improved but citation did not, the page is being read and rejected, which is a quotability problem, not a coverage problem.
Frequently asked questions
Can I do this manually?
For a handful of questions, yes, in a fresh incognito session with memory disabled. Beyond about ten questions across four models it stops being practical to keep consistent.
How many runs per question are enough?
Three to five per model per week gives a usable rate without excessive cost. One run per question tells you very little.
What is a good citation rate?
It depends entirely on category competitiveness. What matters is your own trend line and your rate relative to the competitors appearing in the same answers.
Related guides
- AI search visibility — AI search visibility is how often answer engines mention and cite your brand. How to measure it properly, what moves it, and what to ignore.
- How to rank in ChatGPT — ChatGPT does not rank pages, it picks sources to cite. Here is what makes a page citable, how to measure it, and the fixes that change the answer.
- Why AI doesn't mention your brand — Six concrete reasons ChatGPT and Perplexity skip your brand, how to tell which one applies to you, and the fix for each.