Citations and sources

This section answers three questions about the sources behind your answers: who is cited, how long citations stick, and what kind of pages the AI prefers.

The citation hit-list

The hit-list ranks the domains the AI cites for your topics that are not you: each with citation count, the topics they appear in, and a sample URL. Treat it as your outreach and content target list. An empty hit-list means you are the only one showing up, or there is not enough data yet.

Citation durability

Durability measures how long a cited URL keeps appearing in AI answers: for every cited URL, SEOAI counts the days between its first and last appearance in the period.

1. Average lifespan: longer means your citations stick
2. One-day citations: the share of URLs seen on a single day only
3. Churn warning: raised when more than half of your cited URLs are one-day, while at least one competitor URL held for seven or more days

Churning citations mean the AI rediscources your market constantly and picks whoever looks best that day. The counter-strategy is anchor content on your own domain: original data, real project results, named frameworks, things competitors cannot replicate by Tuesday.

Source types

Every citation is classified by what kind of page it is: own site, forums and UGC, review platforms, editorial, docs and reference, social, video, or company sites. The split tells you where credibility lives in your market. If forums and review platforms dominate, being absent there explains a lot.