The Citations sections (formerly known as Sources) in your Visibility Audit (formerly known as a report) show you which websites AI models reference when they talk about your brand and your competitors. Every domain that turns up alongside an AI answer is part of how the model justifies its recommendations, so Citations is one of the clearest signals you have about who is influencing your category.
Where can I find Citations information?
You can find your Citations in two places in your Visibility Audit:
- The bottom of the Visibility Audit dashboard shows a top 10 snapshot.
- Citations in the left sidebar under Monitor (labeled Citation Audit on the Pro plan) shows every domain cited in the Visibility Audit.
What do the Citations cards on the dashboard show?
At the bottom of the Visibility Audit dashboard, two cards summarize your top citation data:
- Top citations: the top 10 domains AI models cited most often when answering prompts in your Visibility Audit. Click View all citations to open the full Citations page.
- Citation type (source type): the top content categories driving citations. Categories include Business/Service Sites, Social Networks, Forums/Community Sites, News/Media Sites, Blogs/Content Sites, E-commerce Sites, Educational Sites, Directory/Review Sites, Entertainment Sites, and more.
The dashboard cards are limited to a top 10 view. For the full picture, open the Citations page.
What's on the Citations page?
The Citations page lists every domain cited in your Visibility Audit. It is divided into three areas:
- Your domain: shows the total number of citations to your brand's own domain. Use this card to gauge how often AI models pull directly from your content.
- Competitor domains: shows how many of your competitor domains are being cited and the total citation count across all of them. Use this card to gauge how much weight competitor content carries in your category.
- All domains: the full table of every cited domain, sorted by citation count. It includes a category donut chart, a domain search field, and filters for category, model, persona, and topic. Use the filters when you want to focus on a specific model's behavior, a single persona, or one topic at a time.
The Citations page also has an Export CSV button in the top right if you want to work with the data outside Gumshoe.
What strategic questions can Citations help me answer?
Citation data helps you answer questions like:
- Which domains are most influential when AI models recommend brands in your category?
- How much of that influence comes from your own content, competitor content, or independent sites?
- What kinds of content formats (review sites, news, blogs, forums) are AI models favoring?
- Where might your brand earn a citation, by partnering with an authoritative domain or improving content on a domain that is already cited?
Click any domain in the Citations table to see the list of URLs cited on that domain. From there, you can open the details for any individual citation to see which prompts and personas drove it, the AI models that cited the URL, and which brands those models mentioned in their answers.
Pro tip: start with the high-citation domains where your brand does not yet appear. Earning a citation on a page AI models already trust is usually faster than getting a brand-new page picked up.