Citations

Insights

Citations

• Overview
• New Citations
• Who's Citing You
• Browse Citations

Insights

Citations

• which sources shape answers in your category
• what has started citing you recently
• which sources reference your brand
• search everything, read the answers

Overview#

When an AI engine answers a question, it is drawing on sources to do it. Citations shows you which ones.

This tends to be the most immediately useful screen in Seerly, because citations sit upstream of everything else it measures. The sources an engine leans on are what shape whatever it says about you, so influencing those sources is how you influence the answer itself. Visibility tells you that you are missing from somewhere; Citations tells you what is winning in your place, which is the half you can do something about.

The Overview sub-page#

This is the starting point. Sources here are ranked by how much they shape answers in your category across your tracked prompts, rather than by general popularity or authority, which means a niche industry directory can comfortably outrank a famous publication. When that happens it is a genuine finding rather than a quirk of the data, and usually a useful one, since the directory is far easier to get onto.

Citation % shows how much of the total citation volume a source accounts for, and AI Platforms breaks that down by engine, which matters because engines favour noticeably different sources. Break down by domain groups results by source site rather than individual page, and that is usually the right view when you are deciding where to invest effort, since you are choosing a relationship rather than a URL.

Never cites you is the filter worth knowing about. It surfaces sources that demonstrably influence your category and do not mention you anywhere at all. High influence combined with zero presence is, in effect, your priority list already sorted.

Never cites you, applied

Source	Citation %
an industry directory	14%
a review site	11%
a comparison blog	6%

Citation Gap connects through to Gap analysis for the topics you are absent from.

New Citations#

This shows what has started citing you since the previous runs, and it is the natural place to confirm whether work has landed. A page you published six weeks ago appearing here is about as clear a piece of evidence as you will get that the loop is functioning.

None in any previous run marks a genuinely new source rather than one that had gone quiet and has since come back, which is a distinction worth having when you are trying to attribute a change to something you did.

Who's Citing You#

Every source referencing your brand, with how often each one does it. Your own pages appear here alongside review sites, directories, news coverage and community discussion, and it is common to find the third-party sources doing considerably more work for you than your own site is. Last seen tells you whether a source is still active or has quietly dropped away, which is useful when a citation count looks healthy but has not moved in months.

Browse Citations#

The full searchable view, and the place where you can read the answers themselves rather than counting them.

You can narrow things with Filter by AI engine, Filter by topic, Filter by sentiment and Filter by type. Filtered by shows what is currently applied and Clear all resets it, which is worth knowing because filters persist between visits, and an empty result is very often a filter left on rather than a genuine absence. Limited to the selected topic appears when a topic filter is narrowing what you can see.

Narrowing Browse Citations

Filter by AI engine

one engine's answers only

Filter by topic

one tracked topic

Filter by type

the kind of source

Open link takes you to the cited page, and it is worth doing this more often than you probably will. A citation supporting a recommendation and a citation supporting a criticism are indistinguishable in a count and are not remotely the same thing for your business.

Best practices#

• A mix of sources. If every citation traces back to your own domain, your position is more fragile than the numbers make it look, because engines weight independent sources heavily.
• Recurring rather than scattered. A handful of sources citing you consistently is worth more than a long list of sources that cited you once. Recurrence is the signal.
• Cited in the right context. Being referenced inside a recommendation is worth a great deal more than turning up in a list of things to avoid, and the count alone cannot tell them apart.
• Presence on the sources that genuinely influence your category, rather than presence everywhere for its own sake.

Next steps#

1. Start at Overview with Never cites you, since sources with high influence and no presence are the shortest path you have to an improvement.
2. Do the joinable ones first. Directories, listings and review sites are frequently a form submission rather than a content project, and their effects compound quietly.
3. Check your details wherever you already appear. An outdated listing works actively against you, because engines will repeat what it says without knowing it is stale.
4. Study the pages being cited instead of you, paying attention to format and specificity rather than length.
5. Make your own pages citable. Clear structure and direct, concrete claims get quoted, while general marketing prose gives an engine nothing to lift out. Smart Audit covers the mechanics of that.
6. Watch New Citations after publishing rather than watching visibility, because citations move first and visibility follows them.

If you see No citations found for this prompt or Not enough data to show trends yet, that usually means too few runs have completed so far rather than a genuine absence of coverage.

Limitations#

Citations reflect what engines referenced when answering your tracked prompts. A source cited in conversations you do not track will not appear here at all, which is another reason prompt coverage matters. See Prompts.

Citations are also not links. A site can link to you without any engine ever citing it, and that is a separate measurement covered by Web Presence.

Engines expose their sources differently, so how deep the citation data goes varies between them. An engine showing fewer citations is not necessarily consulting fewer sources; it may simply be less forthcoming about them.

Earning a citation also takes time. Published content has to be discovered and indexed before it can be referenced at all, and that typically spans several analysis cycles rather than days.