Citation Gap
A citation gap is the set of sources an AI engine relies on for answers in your category that you neither own nor appear in. Closing the gap — earning coverage or accurate mentions on those third-party domains — is often the fastest way to change what AI says, because those pages already feed the answers.
When an engine answers a category question, it leans on a fairly small set of retrieved sources: review aggregators, comparison articles, community threads, industry blogs. If your brand is absent or misrepresented on the sources that dominate those citations, no amount of on-site optimization fully fixes the answer — the engine is reading someone else's pages.
A citation-gap analysis ranks the non-owned domains by how many relevant answers they influence, then checks your presence on each. The output is effectively an outreach target list ordered by AI impact: update the G2 profile, get added to the two comparison posts engines keep citing, answer the recurring Reddit thread accurately.
This reframes digital PR for the AI era. Link equity mattered for rankings; citation presence matters for answers. The domains worth pursuing are not the highest-DR ones in the abstract but the ones engines demonstrably retrieve for your buyers' questions.
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