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. It also holds two checks that go beyond a single page: your external footprint and the local presence gap.

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.

Blind sources

Blind sources are the platforms where you did not appear in any run of the period while at least one competitor did. Each row names the platform and the competitors that show up there.

On Pro and Agency, when you have uploaded a Bing AI Performance export for the brand under Settings, Integrations, the card also shows one Copilot row, for example "Copilot (Bing AI export, Apr 5, 2026 to Oct 2, 2026): 31 citations on 4 pages". The numbers come from the latest upload: how often Copilot cited your pages and how many of your pages it cited, in the date range of the export. Bing's export does not name other domains, so this row has no competitors and is never a blind source; it is there to show Copilot next to the engines SEOAI tracks. The row is hidden when no export with cited pages has been uploaded. The grounding queries and the cited pages themselves are on the Search tab, in the Copilot cites you for card.

External footprint

On Pro and Agency, the external footprint card compares brand searches, referring domains and domain rank for your domain and the most-cited competitor domains. It explains losses that content alone will not fix.

The local presence gap

Local prompts get a check that has nothing to do with your content. When Google shows a local pack for a prompt and you rank in the organic top 10 but are not in the pack, your page is fine and your Google Business Profile is the problem: an incomplete or unverified profile, a wrong category, a missing address, or too few reviews.

The Local presence gap card lists those prompts on every plan. It only appears when at least one run in the period showed a local pack, and it is decided by the latest run that showed one for each prompt. Each row tells you:

• how often you were in the pack over the period, for example "in 0 of 3 runs"
• your organic rank in that latest run, linked to the ranking page
• which businesses were in the pack instead (businesses you hid via feedback are left out)
• a link that opens that run on the Reports page

A prompt where you are missing from both the organic top 10 and the pack is not listed here; that is a content or authority problem and belongs to the gap classes in Gap diagnosis.