AI Citation Rate
AI Citation Rate is the share of measurable AI answers that cite a brand: cited answers divided by measurable answers.
The denominator
The denominator is the number of answers an AI engine actually produced and we could read — not the number of questions we asked.
Three things make an answer unmeasurable. The engine answered from memory without searching, so it had no sources to cite and zero citations means nothing. Google showed no AI Overview for the query, so there was no AI answer to appear in. Or the engine publishes no history for that market, which is why a non-US index is genuinely shallower than a US one.
Unmeasurable answers are excluded from the denominator and reported as excluded on every page. They are never counted as a brand not being cited: those are different claims, and conflating them would make the rate look worse than the world is.
What counts as citing a brand
- The brand's own domain, and any subdomain of it.
- Further domains that are the same brand — a franchise site, a country site, a legacy name — but only where our published brand list says so. Never inferred from a domain that looks similar.
- The brand's own social profile, matched on an exact handle.
- A retailer, marketplace or directory that lists the brand does not count as the brand. That would measure distribution, not AI visibility.
- A brand cited more than once in the same answer counts once. The rate is a share of answers, not of links.
What it can and cannot be compared with
Two rates are comparable when they come from the same category, the same market, the same engines and the same frozen question set. One index is one category in one market, and the set version is printed on every issue for exactly this reason.
A change between two runs is reported in percentage points, not as a percentage of a percentage, so a reader can check it against the two published rates.
Where the numbers come from
Every answer and every cited source is stored when a run happens, and never edited afterwards. A published figure is recomputed from those stored answers, so it can be traced, disputed and checked. Nothing on an index page is estimated, modelled or averaged from another market.
Used by every issue of the index: SEO agencies .