AI citation decay
AI citation decay is the gradual loss of citations a page or brand receives in AI-generated answers over time, often while the page itself has not changed.
Example
A comparison guide is cited by an AI engine for a set of buyer prompts in March. By September, the same prompts cite newer pages from competitors, and the guide appears in fewer answers, even though nothing on it was edited.
Why it matters
Citations in AI answers are not a fixed asset. Several things can contribute to a decline: newer competing content, details on your page going out of date, changes to an engine's model or retrieval system, or a shift in the kinds of sources an engine tends to favor. The cause is often not visible from the outside, which is why decay is easier to catch by tracking than by checking now and then.
How it is measured
Run the same prompts on the same engines at regular intervals and compare how often your pages are cited in each period. Watching competitors on the same prompts helps separate a change specific to your content from an engine-wide shift that moved everyone.
How Stellarcast handles it
Stellarcast re-runs your tracked prompts on a schedule and stores each reading date-stamped and append-only, so a decline shows up as a trend rather than a surprise. It also marks model-version changes on an engine that moved your visibility, which helps separate an engine-wide shift from a loss specific to your content.
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