Why it matters
Not all mentions are equal. When an AI lists ten brands, readers pay the most attention to the first three — in chat interfaces where scrolling is limited and in citation panels where top results get most clicks. A brand consistently appearing in positions 1-3 has materially better visibility than one consistently appearing in positions 7-10, even if both have the same mention rate.How Cited uses it
Average position is computed from the mention extraction pipeline, which records the ordinal position of each brand in each response. The Cited Index shows a median average position of 5.6 across all brand-category observations. See Average position for per-category benchmarks and optimization guidance.Related concepts
- Average position (full page) — benchmarks and per-category data
- Position bias — why position matters for reader attention
- How Perplexity ranks sources — the platform with the most explicit position signal