Citations

When an AI answers one of your prompts, it often searches the web and links to the pages it used. Each link is a citation. Citations shows you which sites AI cites on your topics, whether those pages name you, and which pages name your rivals but not you.

Open Citations when a score moves and you want to see which sources changed, or when you're choosing where to spend outreach. This guide covers what counts, where you're cited, the five tabs, and a weekly pass.

Citations comes with Growth and Scale. In a client portal it has no Outreach tab.

What counts as a citation

A citation is a link an AI gives as a source in its answer. A mention is your brand named in the words. They often come apart: a page can be cited without naming you, and you can be named with no link at all.

Three things a citation is not:

• Not a brand mention. A page can be cited without naming you, and a model can name you from training data without citing anything. Read ranked answer mentions on the Prompts page; Perception covers descriptions and claims.
• Not a Google rank. Position in a citation list is not a search result position, and small changes in wording reshuffle it. Whether a source is cited at all is the signal, not its slot.
• Not a link to you. Most of your citations are pages on other people's sites. Your own domain is one source among many, and rarely the biggest.

The page that ranks for a search is often not the page that gets cited. Compare the actual sources for the prompt you care about.

Where you're cited

Sources lists every site AI cites on your prompts, with how often it's cited and whether its pages name you. Drawn as tiles sized by their share of the citations, it reads as a map of who AI listens to on your topics. The map below is the example.

Where the data comes from

Trakkr records the sources these AIs return with their answers:

AI	What it returns
ChatGPT, with web search	The pages its web-search answers cite
Google AI Overviews	The reference pages attached to an AI Overview
Perplexity	Every link in Perplexity's source list

The other AIs Trakkr reads don't return sources Trakkr records, so they have no citations. Pick one of them in a tab's Cited by filter and the page says citations aren't recorded for it.

Check the stated window and the page's Data through date. Older snapshots may cover all recorded history. New sources show after your next daily report.

How each citation is classified

Every cited site has one of eight kinds: Yours, Rivals' own sites, Media, Social, Reviews, Institutions, Press releases and Other. Source Type explains them. They describe the kind of source, not a weight an AI gives it.

Trakkr reads each cited page and gives it one verdict for your brand:

• Names you: the page, its title, its address, or a quote an AI took from it names your brand. Open the page to see the exact words and where they came from.
• Only rivals: Trakkr read the page and it names rivals but not you. These pages are your gaps.
• No brands: Trakkr read the page and it names no tracked brand.
• Can't read: the page couldn't be read. Some sites block automated reading, some pages need a sign-in, and files have no fixed page text. The row says why. A page Trakkr can't read never counts as a gap.
• Reading: the page hasn't been read yet. New pages are read in the next daily refresh.

Your own pages and your rivals' own sites are marked as such instead.

Each page also carries its tone toward your brand (scored 0 to 100), the prompts and searches that led to it, and when it was first cited. A site's drawer shows its Domain Rating.

To have a page read again, open its row menu in Pages and choose Recheck now. Each page can be rechecked once in 24 hours, and each brand has 20 rechecks a day; the menu says how many are left. The page is read in the next daily refresh.

The five tabs

Each tab answers one question. Start on Sources; go to Pages when you want the exact URL to get into.

Read the window shown for each view. What's new, in the page bar, lists what changed.

Sources

Every site, one row

The default view. Every citation is grouped by site, so you read publications rather than raw URLs. The pills above the list are All, Name you (sites with a page that names you), Gaps (sites whose cited pages name rivals and never you) and New.

Sort by Citations, Change in 30 days, Pages naming your brand, Rivals named, Tone or Site authority. The Filter menu narrows by kind of source, the AI that cited it, tone and tags.

Click a site to open its drawer: citations over time, the pages AI cites there and what each says about you, the brands on its pages, and the prompts that lead to it. For a site that isn't yours or a rival's, Plan outreach opens it in Outreach.

Pages

Pages flattens the same data to single URLs. One guide on a site often drives most of its citations, and only this view shows you which.

The pills are All, Names your brand, Only rivals, No brands, Can't read, Yours and New. Yours is the useful corrective: the list of your own pages AI actually cites is short for nearly everyone, and rarely the pages you expected. Pages from Search Console that rank in Google's top ten but have never been cited are listed too, marked Never cited.

When a cited URL already has a page record, its row menu offers Open its page record, which opens it in Pages.

What's new

What's new opens a drawer of what changed in your citations over the last 7 or 30 days, grouped by day: pages that started citing, rivals that showed up on a page, pages no longer cited, and pages whose tone toward you changed. Filter it to New, Rivals, Lost or Tone.

Read it weekly on the last 7 days. It is the quickest way to catch lost coverage, a rival taking a page you used to own, or the first results of a PR push.

Queries

A query is a web search an AI ran while answering one of your prompts, with the pages that search cited. Queries reads your citations from that direction.

The pills are All, No page names your brand, Mostly rivals, Searched for your brand, and Winnable (searches where Search Console says you already rank in Google's top ten). Sort by Citations, Opportunity, Gaps first, Most searched, Rivals named or Newest, and filter by AI, tags and audience.

Each row's menu can ask Agent to Write a page for this prompt, Open the prompt, or search Google for the query.

Videos

The videos AI cites when it answers questions about your category, mostly YouTube. The pills are All, Mention your brand, Only rivals, Yours and New; sort by Citations, Prompts, Last seen, Tone or Views. Use it to find the channels shaping answers in your category, and the clips that get you wrong.

Whether a video mentions you comes from Trakkr's analysis of the video, or from a cited page that names you. Claims to check filters to videos whose analysis flagged something it says about you.

Outreach

Outreach turns sites that cite rivals but not you into a queue: To pitch, Contacted, Won and Set aside. Trakkr researches who decides at each publisher and writes a pitch grounded in their page. Nothing is sent until you send it, from your connected Gmail or your own mail. Outreach covers it in full.

Scope, filters and export

Each tab's Filter menu holds its scope: the AI that cited a page (Cited by), tags, and the tab's own filters. Citations covers every market together.

Export, in the page bar, gives the current tab's full set as a CSV on Sources, Pages and Queries: All sources, All pages or All queries, plus Detailed, one row per search and cited page. With What's new open it exports that list. The files use your tag filter, not the on-screen filters.

Investigate a citation

1. 1Select the right brand, AI and tags. Note the Data through date so you can return to the same evidence.
2. 2Open Pages and find the URL. Use Yours, Names, Only rivals or Can't read to narrow the list.
3. 3Open the page and read its verdict. A quote from an AI's answer and a read of the live page are different pieces of evidence.
4. 4Open the source URL and compare what it says now with the stored evidence. Check the page title, redirects and whether the relevant text needs a sign-in.
5. 5Use Queries to find the searches behind the source, and Open the prompt to read the answer. A cited URL does not by itself mean the answer recommended your brand.
6. 6If the page changed, choose Recheck now from its row menu. A Can't read verdict is unknown, so do not count it as a confirmed omission.
7. 7Choose the next step from the evidence. For your own page, open its record in Pages if it has one. For an independent publisher that leaves you out, use Outreach. For a misleading claim, check Accuracy or Perception.

Keep a short note of the URL, question, AI, date and exact evidence. That is enough to explain the finding to a teammate without claiming that one source caused the whole answer.

A weekly pass

1. 1On Sources, sort by Change in 30 days and read the top five. A site rising fast is one AI cites more often now.
2. 2Open the biggest one whose pages don't name you. Its drawer lists the pages AI cites there, and the brands each one names.
3. 3Choose Plan outreach to pitch it, or open What's new on the last 7 days for pages you lost.

Common questions