GlossaryAI search
What is an LLM citation?
Also called: AI citation, cited source, AI mention
Definition
An LLM citation is a link or named source that an AI assistant shows alongside its answer to say where information came from. Being cited sends referral traffic and signals that your page was trusted.
LLM citation, explained
When an assistant like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews answers with web results, it usually shows sources: inline numbered links, a list of cards, or linked phrases. Those are citations. They're different from a mention, where the model names your brand without linking to you, possibly from its training data rather than a live search.
Citations come from retrieval. The assistant searches an index (its own, a partner's or Google's), reads some of the results, and cites the ones it used. That means the usual preconditions apply: the assistant's search crawler must be allowed to fetch your pages, the pages must be in its index, and your content must be a good match for the sub-question it's answering. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.
Mentions without links are harder to influence and come from what the model learned or read. Consistent, accurate descriptions of your product across your site, directories, reviews and articles make it more likely the model describes you correctly.
What tends to earn citations: a direct, quotable answer; specific facts, ideally with their own sources; original information such as data, pricing or first-hand results; and pages that are clearly about one thing. Pages that bury the answer, or say the same thing as ten others, are less likely to be chosen.
Citation traffic is small but often high-intent, because the person already read a summary that included you. Look for referrers like chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai in your analytics.
Why it matters for founders
A citation is the AI-era version of ranking. It puts your link in front of someone mid-decision, and it's one of the few ways a new site can appear next to much bigger brands.
Example
A user asks Perplexity how to block AI training crawlers but keep AI search. The answer cites a guide that lists each company's bot names with links to their docs, and the user clicks through to its robots.txt generator.
Common mistakes
- Blocking the search crawlers of the assistants you want to be cited by.
- Confusing mentions from training data with live citations.
- Not tracking AI referrers in analytics.
- Making claims without sources, which gives an assistant little reason to trust the page.
Sources
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Related terms
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content more likely to be found, used and cited in answers from AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews.
- AI crawlersAI crawlers are bots run by AI companies that fetch web pages, either to collect training data, to build an index for AI search answers, or to read a page a user asked about. Each has its own robots.txt name.
- AI share of voiceAI share of voice is how often your brand is mentioned or cited in AI assistants' answers to a fixed set of relevant prompts, compared with competitors. It's the AI-search version of share of search.
- GroundingGrounding is giving an AI model real source content, such as search results or documents, at the moment it answers, so the answer is based on that content instead of only what the model memorized in training.