Citation
A link an answer engine attaches to a claim, naming the page the claim came from — as distinct from an unlinked mention.
Updated
A citation is a link an answer engine attaches to a claim, naming the page that claim came from.
It is not the same as a mention, and the difference is worth money. A model can name your company from what it retained in training, with no link and no page behind it. A citation points at a URL, survives being clicked, and is the only form of AI visibility you can attribute traffic to.
What makes a page citable?
Mechanics, not merit. The page has to be fetchable by the crawler that feeds the engine. The claim has to be in the HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript after load. And it has to be self-contained enough to lift out without dragging four paragraphs of narrative along with it.
Those three are what the crawler-access, extractability and answer-shape checks in our audit measure, and together they are 57 of the 100 points — because a page that fails them cannot be cited no matter how good its argument is.
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