What is an AI citation?
An AI citation is an attribution inside an AI-generated answer — a link, footnote, or named mention that credits a website as the source of a claim. Citations are the currency of AI search: they are how a site is visible at all inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews, and they carry the referral traffic and brand trust that ranked links used to.
Not all citations are equal. Being the named recommendation in the prose ("the best free tool for this is X") is worth more than a footnote source; being cited for your own name is table stakes, while being cited for the money questions your customers ask ("best CRM for contractors") is the outcome AEO actually optimizes for. Tracking citation rate and position per query, per engine, over time is how AI visibility is measured.
Engines cite what they can retrieve, parse, and defend. Retrieval requires crawl access and indexable content; parsing rewards answer-first structure and clean markup; defensibility favors sources with strong E-E-A-T signals — the engine is lending you its credibility, and it prices that risk.