AI Citations
AI citations are the source links an AI engine attaches to its answer, showing which pages grounded each statement. Engines with live retrieval — Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews — cite routinely. Citations are the clearest lever in GEO: whichever pages get cited largely control what the answer says.
Citations turn the black box partially transparent. When an engine claims your product lacks a feature, the citation shows where that claim came from — an outdated review, a competitor's comparison table, a stale docs page. Without citations you are debugging blind; with them, every wrong claim has a return address.
Being cited is also the closest thing GEO has to ranking. A page that engines repeatedly cite for a category question occupies that answer the way a #1 result occupies a SERP — and citation share can be measured per prompt, per engine, per domain.
Two practical disciplines follow: track citation share on the prompts that matter (yours versus third parties versus competitors), and treat frequently cited third-party pages as tier-one outreach targets, because correcting or entering those pages changes answers faster than publishing something new and hoping it gets retrieved.
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