Annotations

An annotation is a dated note about a change to your site: a new page, a rewrite, a redirect, a pricing change, a campaign tweak. On its own it is a marker on every chart, so the next time a line moves you can see what happened that day. Add an expectation and it becomes a small experiment: AmICited compares the numbers before and after the change and tells you whether it met your target.

This closes the loop most teams skip. You publish an article for a set of not-ranked prompts, and 60 days later nobody remembers whether it worked. An annotation remembers for you.

Add an annotation#

1. Open Annotations

   Go to Annotations and click Add annotation. You can also add one straight from a chart that shows annotations.

2. Describe the change

   • Title. A short name you will recognize in reports.
   • Note (optional). Context whoever reviews the result later will need.
   • Event date. The day the change went live, not the day you record it. Every measurement window starts from this date.
   • Category. Publish, Content update, Redesign, Campaign change, Pricing change, Technical change, Merge, Redirect, Prune or Custom. It only groups annotations in reports.
   • Scope. The pages affected: one URL, a Directory and everything below it, or the whole Domain. Measurements are restricted to the scope, and changing it later restarts the expectations.

3. Add an expectation (optional)

   Read the fields as one sentence: metric must operator by target type target value. For example, “AI citations of this page, increase, percent delta, 25”.

   Turn on De-trending to subtract what comparable pages did over the same period, so a site-wide rise is not credited to this change.

4. Pick milestones

   Choose when the expectation is checked: 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days after the event, or a custom number of days. Each ticked milestone is evaluated independently against the same target. Click Save annotation.

Metrics you can set expectations on#

Expectations are grouped by channel. Only metrics that can be measured within the chosen scope are offered, and some need a connected integration.

Worked example#

You rewrite /pricing/ on March 1 and expect organic clicks to the page to rise by at least 10%, checked at 60 days. By default the baseline window has the same length as the post window, so AmICited compares the 60 days before the event with the 60 days after. The page earned 2,400 clicks before and 2,760 after.

(2,760 − 2,400) ÷ 2,400 × 100 = +15%, so the 60-day milestone is Met. With de-trending on, if comparable pages rose 8% over the same period, the net change is 15% − 8% = 7% and the result is Missed.

Outcomes and review#

Each milestone moves through Pending, Due, and then a result:

• Met. The measured change reached the target.
• Missed. It did not.
• Inconclusive. The system could not judge fairly, and says why: no baseline data, no post data, an incomplete window, an insufficient sample, a metric unavailable for the scope, or de-trending unavailable.

An annotation with no expectation is Informational: a dated marker, nothing to judge. Due, met, missed and inconclusive results also land in your inbox, and the Needs review filter collects the annotations waiting for a human.

The detail page keeps the recorded change, the machine measurement and the human decision separately visible. Close an annotation to record your own verdict (passed or failed, with an optional reason) without changing the checkpoint results, and Reopen it if you change your mind. Bulk actions let you close as passed, reopen or delete many at once; deleting keeps historical measurements and notifications.

Automatic annotations from sitemaps#

Under Settings on the Annotations page you can let a domain create annotations on its own. When it is on, a sitemap change on your domain creates one annotation expecting organic clicks to rise 10%, checked 60 days after the page’s last modification date. These show System as the creator. Competitor sitemaps are never annotated.

Where annotations show up#

• Annotations page. Table with scope, category, creator, event date, next evaluation, latest result and a trend sparkline, plus a timeline, an outcome heatmap (each expectation against each milestone) and a performance chart. Filter by status, outcome, scope, category, creator, metric or dates, and export the rows shown.
• Charts across the app. Event markers on traffic charts, with the details one click away.
• Reports → Traffic → Annotation outcomes. “Did the work we did actually pay off?” across all annotations. See search and traffic reports.

Related#