AI citation tracking
AI citation tracking is the practice of recording which web pages AI engines cite as sources in their answers to a fixed set of prompts, and how those citations change over time.
What it records
For each AI answer, citation tracking records the sources the engine showed: the URL, the domain, its position in the list of sources, and whether it belongs to you, to a competitor or to a third party such as a review site or forum. Repeated over days, those records give citation counts per engine, your citation share, and the pages that are gaining or losing citations.
It is a different question from mention tracking. An engine can name your brand without citing your site, and it can cite one of your pages in an answer that recommends a competitor.
Example
As an illustration, suppose you track 30 prompts on one engine for a week, 210 answers in all. Those answers cite 1,050 sources: 84 are pages on your site, 231 are competitors' pages and 735 are third-party sources. Your pages were cited 84 times out of 1,050, a citation share of 8%, and the 735 third-party citations show where the engine looks when it does not use you.
Why it matters
Citations tell you which pages an engine trusts enough to use, which makes them the most direct lead on what to improve. A page that loses citations while its content has not changed is showing citation decay, and a third-party domain that is cited again and again is a place worth earning a mention. Because AI answers vary from run to run, read citations over several days rather than from a single check.
How Stellarcast handles it
Stellarcast records every source an AI answer cites, with its URL and position, and classifies it as your own site, a competitor's or an earned third-party source. It counts your owned citations per engine and shows which competitor domain an engine cited when it did not cite you.
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