Glossary
AI Citations
References that AI engines surface alongside generated answers, linking the user back to the source page.
AI citations are the source attributions that appear in AI-generated answers — typically as inline numbered references, link cards, or "Sources" footers. Perplexity displays them most prominently; ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews also surface them.
How do AI engines decide what to cite?
Engines retrieve candidate pages via a combination of semantic search over their training corpus, live web retrieval (Bing, Google), and ranking signals from the underlying search infrastructure. The page that gets cited is usually one with a clear, extractable answer to the user's specific query.
How is citation rate measured?
Run a panel of representative prompts against each engine on a recurring schedule, parse the cited sources, and compute (citations of your domain) / (total cited sources). Cite Hustle's audit feature does this for prospect sites.
Part of the Cite Hustle GEO glossary — definitions for generative engine optimization and AI search.