Citation Intelligence Dashboard

The Citation Intelligence dashboard provides deep analysis of how AI platforms cite sources across all your AI Visibility Reports. Understanding citation patterns helps you optimize content to be more frequently cited.

What You'll Learn

In this guide, you'll learn:

How to interpret citation analytics
What different citation formats mean
How to identify influential third-party sources and filter them by date, platform, and project
How to use citation trends for content strategy
How to create PR projects directly from top citation sources

Prerequisites

Citations are tracked based on the AI Visibility reports you run for the property. If you haven't run a report there will not be any data here to view.

Citation Overview

At the top of the dashboard, you'll see summary metrics:

Total Citations: How many times sources were cited across all reports
Owned Media: How many times your domain (or competitor domains you track) was cited
Non-Owned Citations: All citations that did not come from one of your owned domains. This is the broadest "external coverage" number — it includes press, editorial mentions, review sites, reference sites, and any source we haven't been able to classify into a more specific bucket
Listicle Citations: Citations from list-format content like "best of" or "top 10" articles

Charts and Analysis

Media Type Distribution

This chart breaks down all of your citations by the kind of source that produced them — not by what kind of page it is, but by the relationship that source has to your brand.

Media Type	Description
Owned Media	A citation from your own domain or one of the competitor domains you've added to the property.
Press Coverage	Editorial coverage in news/media outlets (e.g. major newspapers, trade press).
Editorial Mentions	Non-press editorial content that mentions one or more of the brands in this space — typically blogs and articles citing brands as part of a wider piece. (This is brand-agnostic; it does not specifically mean "mentions of your brand" — to filter by that, use the Brand Attribution filter on the Third-Party Citation Sources table further down.)
Review Sites	Review platforms like G2, Capterra, Yelp, Trustpilot.
Social & Community	Forums, Reddit, Quora, Medium, LinkedIn.
Reference Sites	Wikipedia and other reference/encyclopedia sources.
Video Platforms	YouTube, Vimeo, embedded video.
Unclassified Source	Sources we haven't been able to classify into one of the buckets above. We try to keep this slice as small as possible — see the methodology page for how source classification works.

A note on the "Non-Owned Citations" KPI vs. the buckets above. The KPI at the top of the dashboard counts every citation that is not from an owned domain. That's a single number. The Media Type Distribution chart then splits those non-owned citations across all of the source-type buckets above (plus owned media). So the KPI total and the sum of all non-owned slices in this chart should match.

Authority Distribution

This shows the authority level of cited sources:

Major Media: Well-known publications, major news sites
Reference/Encyclopedia: Wikipedia, Britannica, and other reference sites
Trade Media: Industry-specific publications
Local Media: Regional news publications or guides
Conpany Websites: Yours or competitors' websites, or smaller third-party sites

If your citations are primarily from low-authority sources, focus on building presence on higher-authority platforms.

Platform Coverage

This chart shows which AI platforms generate the most citations. Understanding which platforms are generating more citations can help you decide which platforms to focus on optimizing for.

Citation Content Formats

We categorize several different types of citations:

General Article: Traditional informational page content in article format that doesn't fit a more specific category below
Listicle: Best-of or category comparison content
How-to Guides: Detailed walkthroughs or instructional articles
News: Articles in major, trade pub, or regional news sources
Reference: Authoritative guides like Wikipedia
Reviews: Review platforms like Yelp, G2, Capterral, TrustPilot, or regional or sector-specific review sites

Some formats are more likely to generate click-throughs than others. Listicles are a very common format for citations since they naturally describe differences in category options.

Citation Trends Over Time

The trends chart shows how citation patterns change across your report history:

Rising citations: Your authority is growing
Stable citations: Maintaining position
Declining citations: May indicate increased competition or content staleness

Look for correlations between citation trends and:

New content publication
Content updates
Competitor activity
AI platform changes

You can compare breakdowns over time of different types of citations:

Earned media vs. owned media
Media Type
Source Authority
Content Format

Top Third-Party Citation Sources

This list shows which external domains are most frequently cited in AI responses, ranked by citation count. The list updates in real time when you change any filter (date range, project, platform, or content format) — so if you narrow the view to a specific platform or date window, the source rankings reflect only that filtered data.

Column	Description
Domain	The cited website
Citations	Number of times cited within the active filter window
Media types	The content types that were cited from this domain

Using This Data

Outreach Opportunities: High-citation sources in your space are influential. Consider:

Contributing guest content
Building relationships for backlinks
Monitoring their content strategy

Competitive Intelligence: If competitors' domains appear here frequently, study what content gets cited.

Content Gaps: If certain topics are always cited from third parties, you may need to create authoritative content on those topics.

Creating a PR Project from Citation Sources

Each source row has a checkbox. Select any combination of domains you want to monitor and a Create PR Project button appears in the card header showing the count of selected domains. Clicking it takes you directly to the New Project form with:

Project type pre-set to PR
All selected domains pre-filled as publisher targets

From there you only need to confirm a name, set a start date, and assign prompts. This is the fastest way to turn "we're being outcompeted on these third-party sites" into a structured PR campaign with tracked goals.

Tip: Use the date range and platform filters first to find the sources that matter most for a specific context — for example, filter to the last 30 days and a single platform to see which publishers are driving citations on that platform right now — then select those sources to create a precisely targeted PR project.

Taking Action

To Increase Your Citation Rate

Create citable content: Research reports, original data, comprehensive guides
Add structured data: Help AI understand your content type
Build authority signals: Backlinks, mentions, social proof
Update regularly: Fresh content is more likely to be cited
Cover topics comprehensively: Thin content rarely gets cited

To Appear in More Citation Contexts

Review which third-party sources get cited
Create content covering similar topics
Ensure your content is at least as comprehensive
Target the specific grounding searches that trigger citations
Monitor citation trends after publishing

Best Practices

Track Citation Patterns, Not Just Counts

Raw citation counts fluctuate. Focus on:

Are you being cited for the right topics?
Are citation contexts positive or neutral?
Are you gaining share vs. third parties?

AI Visibility Reports — Run reports to generate citation data
AI Traffic Analytics — Track when users click through from AI citations
Projects — Create PR projects from top citation sources and track campaign goals
Getting Started — Install the tracking plugin