Mentions vs. citations

Why the difference matters#

When an engine answers “what is the best accounting software for freelancers?”, two separate things happen. It names some brands in its answer, and it cites some pages as the sources it used. These overlap far less than you would expect:

• Your brand can be named because a review site said good things about you, while your own site is never cited.
• Your blog post can be cited as a source for a definition, while the answer recommends a competitor.

The first is a reputation win with no traffic path to you. The second is a content win that helps someone else. Tracking only one of them hides half the picture, so AmICited records both from every answer and never merges them into one number.

How each is recorded#

Brand mentions#

After each answer is stored, a small language model reads the text and lists every brand it names. For each brand it records:

• Brand name, as written in the answer.
• Position: order of first appearance among the brands named, where 1 is the first brand in the answer.
• Source URL: the link the answer gave for that brand, if it gave one.

Each brand is counted once per answer, at its earliest position, however many times it is repeated. Spelling variants collapse to one brand: case, spaces, punctuation and accents are ignored, and acme.com reduces to acme.

Your brand is recognized by matching against the brand name and domain you set for the domain. Every other brand is kept too, which is how AmICited detects competitors you never added.

Citations#

Every URL in the engine’s source list is stored as a citation with its domain (a leading www. removed), title, snippet and position in the list (1 = first source). Your citations are the ones whose host matches your domain.

The plain Google organic results collected alongside AI Overviews are kept as a Google Search baseline and excluded from all citation metrics.

Which metrics use which#

Worked example#

ChatGPT answers a prompt with: “Top options are Rival, Acme and Other”, and lists three sources: reviewsite.com/best-tools, rival.com/pricing, acme.com/blog/guide.

• Brand mentions: Rival (position 1), Acme (position 2), Other (position 3).
• Citations: reviewsite.com (position 1), rival.com (position 2), acme.com (position 3).

If you are Acme, this answer counts toward your visibility (you were named), adds 1 of 3 brand mentions to share of voice, gives you rank 2, and adds 1 of 3 citations to your share of citation.

Change the answer so it names only Rival and Other while still citing your guide: your visibility for the prompt drops to zero, yet your share of citation is unchanged.

How to act on each#

• To earn mentions, get your brand onto the pages engines already cite for your prompts: review sites, comparisons, listicles, directories. Start from Sources filtered to the prompts you lose.
• To earn citations, publish pages that answer the prompt and its sub-questions directly. Use query fan-out and prompt coverage to see which questions your pages leave unanswered.
• To turn citations into mentions, name your brand plainly on the pages that are already cited, next to the claim the engine uses.

Related#