AI search
AI citation
A link to a source page inside an AI-written answer. Being cited is not the same as being mentioned: an answer can name a business without linking it, and link a page without naming the business.
Assistants that search the web link the pages they drew on, and those links are the citations. They are the part of an AI answer you can influence most directly: by publishing the page that answers the question, or by being listed on a page that is already cited.
What gets cited depends on the question. In our study of Google's AI Overviews on 14 November 2026, 42 Overviews cited 356 pages. For "X or Y" questions, 44 of the 81 citations were comparison pages. For how-to questions, 31 of 88 were YouTube videos.
Two platforms now report citations to site owners for free. Bing's AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, counts how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Google's generative AI performance report, on every site since 31 August 2026, counts how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Neither tells you where in the answer you appeared.