When an answer engine supports a claim with a source, Genezio records that source. With these records, you can explain your visibility, and not only measure it.

​
Why citations are the useful part

A visibility score tells you your position. Citations tell you the cause of that position. You can act on a source. You cannot act directly on a score. For example, answer engines recommend a competitor in thirty answers. The same comparison page is a citation in twenty of these answers. Thus, you do not have a problem in thirty answers. You have one page to work on.

​
What Genezio records

For each citation, Genezio records these items:
  • The source of the claim.
  • The answer that the source supported.
  • The channel or the author that published the source, if the source identifies one. Refer to Channels and authors.
Genezio counts the citations across all conversations. The result is Citation frequency: a ranked list of the sources that shape your category.

​
Not all answers have citations

Answer engines are different. Some answer engines give many citations. Others answer from the data that the model already has and give no citations. An answer without citations is not a detection failure. It shows that the answer engine did not show its sources. These answers still count for visibility. But they are more difficult to diagnose. In some categories, answer engines give most answers without citations. In these categories, your position comes from the data that models learned during training. It does not come from the data that models can retrieve now.

​
What to do with citations

Use this procedure:
  1. Find a topic where you lose.
  2. Open the conversations and read the cited sources.
  3. Decide if you can be a better source for that question than the current sources.
The result is a brief with a known audience and a known competitor. This is different from a content calendar.