An AI citation is an explicit source reference — a numbered footnote, a link card, or a named attribution — that a generative engine such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews attaches to its answer to show where a claim came from. Where traditional SEO competed for rankings on a results page, GEO competes for citations: being one of the handful of sources an engine retrieves, trusts, and credits when it composes a response. Citations matter twice over — they are a public trust signal, and the links inside AI answers are often the only clickable path from an AI conversation back to your site.
Key takeaways
- An AI citation credits a source document inside a generated answer. It is different from an AI brand mention, which only names your brand in the answer text.
- Citations are re-decided at every generation. Engines retrieve a fresh shortlist of sources per query, so the same prompt can cite you today and skip you tomorrow.
- Formats vary by engine: numbered footnotes in Perplexity and ChatGPT search, link cards in Google AI Overviews, and in-text attributions that may carry no link at all.
- Fact-dense, extractable, entity-clear content earns citations; raw domain authority alone does not.
- GEOly AI weights citations at 25% of its AIGVR visibility score and maps which domains each of 7 engines actually cites in your category.
How AI engines generate citations
Every cited answer comes out of a three-step pipeline. First, retrieval: the engine turns the user's prompt into one or more grounding queries and pulls a shortlist of documents from a web index or live search — usually a handful, rarely more than a few dozen. Second, synthesis: the model reads those passages and composes a single answer. Third, attribution: it attaches references to specific claims, as footnotes, cards, or named sources.
Two consequences follow. There is no position eleven — you either make the retrieved set and get credited, or you are absent from the answer entirely. And because retrieval runs per query, per engine, per generation, citations are volatile in a way backlinks never were.
Access is the silent prerequisite. Engines can only cite what their crawlers can fetch: OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT search citations, PerplexityBot feeds Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews draws on ordinary Googlebot crawling (OpenAI documents its bots here). If your robots.txt blocks these AI crawlers, no amount of content quality will get you cited.
