Assistants and answers
Being named or linked inside an answer a machine assembled — the unit of answer-engine visibility, and the one your own server cannot see.
Also called AI citation · Source link · Цитирование
A citation happens on the assistant's surface, not on yours. The page was fetched at some earlier point, the sentence was written from it, and the reader may never arrive. That is the structural difference from a search result: a ranking is an offer to visit, a citation is credit for having been read, and only one of them appears in your analytics.
It follows that a citation cannot be counted the way a click is counted. There is no log to query. It can only be established by asking the assistant a question and reading the answer, which is a sample, which means the sample is the measurement and has to be published with it.
The one thing a server does see is the fetch that precedes it. A user-triggered request — ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User — means a person asked something a moment ago and the machine went to read a page in order to answer. It does not prove a citation followed, and it is the closest first-party evidence available.
- Article on proxy-app architecture
- 1 fetch
- Article on the 2026 UAE civil code
- 2 fetches
- Glossary — Core Web Vitals
- 1 fetch
- Total, ChatGPT-User
- 4 fetches across 3 pages
Four requests, each triggered by somebody's question rather than by a crawl schedule. Whether any of the four became a citation is not knowable from this side, and the honest report says four fetches rather than four citations.
Most citations send nobody. The answer is complete on the assistant's page and the link is a courtesy the reader has no reason to take, so a rising citation count and flat traffic is the expected result rather than a contradiction to explain. Decide in advance which of the two you are buying, because the work that produces each is not the same work.
Definitions of the unit. Nothing here is calculated, and almost every argument about a marketing number is really an argument about one of these.
Cannot be computed without
- Assistant fetch
- One request for a page by a declared automated client of an AI system — the only unit of attention in answer engines that a site can count on its own server.
Is an input to
- Citation share
- How often you appear among the sources for a set of questions — a number whose entire meaning lives in the set, which is the part suppliers omit.
An error in this figure does not stay in it. It reaches one number above it, and each of those is quoted as though it were measured.
Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.
- Testing a promise about AI answers
- “We will get you cited by ChatGPT and the other assistants.” · 20 minutes, 5 questions.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.