Key metrics

Citations

A citation is a URL a platform referenced while producing an answer. Where the other metrics describe what the platforms say, citations describe where they got it from, which makes them the most actionable layer of your data: a page that is cited can be improved, and a page that is missing can be written.

How they are measured

Every citation in a response is recorded with its URL and its rank among the response's citations. Citations are then grouped by source, which is the domain the URL belongs to, and aggregated over the responses matching the active filter into three figures.

Usage: The percentage of responses that cited the source at least once: round(responses citing the source / total responses × 100). This is the primary figure, and sources are ranked by it.
Uses: The absolute number of responses that cited the source.
Average citations: The average number of URLs from the source cited per citing response, which shows whether a platform leans on one page or several.

The same aggregation exists one level deeper for individual URLs, so you may see not just that a domain shapes the answers but which specific page does.

Source types

Each source is classified by type, such as news, blog, forum, social, video, review, directory, wiki, or documentation. The type breakdown tells you what kind of material the platforms trust for your prompts. A category dominated by review sites and forums calls for a very different content strategy than one dominated by documentation and news.

Acting on citations

Citations close the loop that the other metrics open. When visibility is low on a set of prompts, the cited sources for those prompts show which pages the platforms are reading instead of yours. When sentiment slips, the citations of the offending responses usually point at the page carrying the criticism. Typically, the highest-leverage work is earning a presence on the handful of sources with the highest usage for your prompt set.

Where they appear

The project overview lists the top sources and top URLs by usage under the active filter, and the sources section of the app provides the full ranked list with a detail page per source. The sources page in this documentation covers those views in more detail.