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Citation share is the percentage of all citations appearing in your category’s AI answers that point to a domain you own. If AI platforms cited 1,000 sources across your tracked prompts in a given week and 80 of those citations pointed at your website, your citation share is 8%. It is a market-share measure: it describes how much of the source pool your domain occupies, relative to every other site AI platforms drew on to answer questions in your category.
How much of what AI cites is yours.
Citations to your site ÷ all citations

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Why it matters

Citation share tells you how crowded your category’s source pool is and how much of it you hold. A brand can be well cited in absolute terms and still hold a small share, because the answers lean on a wide field of review sites, trade publications, and competitors. Moving citation share means displacing other sources, not just adding your own. Because the denominator is every citation in the category, citation share also moves when other sources gain or lose ground. A flat citation share alongside rising competitor coverage means you are being crowded out even if nothing about your own site changed.

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How Cited uses it

Citation share is the headline citation number on your dashboard Overview, shown with a week-over-week delta. It is computed over your selected window across all tracked platforms, and it matches the “Owned %” figure on the Source Intelligence category breakdown exactly, so the two surfaces cannot disagree.

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Not the same as citation rate

The formulas are the whole difference: One divides by the category’s whole source pool; the other divides by the answers that name you. That is why they read an order of magnitude apart, and why across tracked brands they are close to uncorrelated — the ranking even inverts at the extremes. A brand can hold a small citation share in a crowded category while being reliably linked whenever it is discussed, and the reverse is equally possible. Both sit side by side across the dashboard — Overview, AI Platforms, Prompts & Responses, and Topics.
Citation rate was redefined on 14 August 2026, so values from before that date are not comparable with values after it. See what changed.

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What the numbers look like

Citation share reads low by construction — commonly low single digits, where citation rate reads in the tens of percent. That gap is the denominator, not underperformance: the source pool in any category is large and most of it will never be yours. Judge citation share against your competitors’ share and against your own trend, never against your citation rate.

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Where each one is available

Citation share is defined at every level of the source hierarchy, so it works on a single domain or a single page — which is why Source Intelligence is built on it. Citation rate is not available per source: its denominator is answers that mention your brand, and an individual page has no such denominator. Asking for it returns an error rather than a plausible-looking number.
  • Citation rate — the conversion counterpart to this metric
  • Citation — the atomic unit both metrics count
  • Citation source — the page or domain a citation points to
  • Share of voice — the equivalent market-share measure for mentions rather than citations