Citation Rate
Citation Rate — The frequency at which an AI engine cites or mentions a brand in response to relevant prompts. Citation rate is a key AEO metric, measured as the percentage of relevant prompts that produce a citation for your brand. Higher citation rates indicate better AI visibility.
Citation rate is the primary metric for measuring AEO success. It answers the question: "When someone asks AI about my industry, how often does the AI mention my brand?" A citation rate of 60% means that for every 10 relevant prompts tracked, your brand appears in 6 of the AI-generated responses.
Citation rates vary significantly across AI engines. You might have a 70% citation rate on Perplexity (which uses real-time web search) but only 30% on OpenAI (which relies more on training data). This is why multi-engine tracking matters. CiteRank calculates your citation rate across all tracked prompts and engines, giving you an aggregate AEO score as well as per-engine breakdowns.