Cited sources and share of voice
How answer citation rate, official-site citation rate, domain citation rate and share of voice are calculated.
On this page
AI answers often come with citation links. PeakGEO stores the citations each answer actually gives, counts which sites and pages are cited most, and checks whether your official website is among them. Share of voice then compares how present your brand is in answers relative to your competitors. This page explains how these numbers are calculated and how to read them.
Citation metrics
Citation metrics differ from the mention and recommendation rates in Metric definitions in one key way: the denominator is all valid answers in the current scope, regardless of question type — answers to brand verification questions are included.
| Metric | Formula | Counting rule |
|---|---|---|
| Per-source citation rate | Valid answers citing the URL ÷ all valid answers | An answer that cites the same URL several times counts once |
| Answer citation rate | Valid answers citing at least one website ÷ all valid answers | Shows whether answers give sources at all |
| Official-site citation rate | Valid answers citing your official website (including subdomains) ÷ all valid answers | Domains are normalized first |
| Domain citation rate | Valid answers citing the domain ÷ all valid answers | De-duplicated by domain within each answer |
In Visibility, "Answers with citations" shows how many answers carry at least one citation, and "Citation coverage" is the answer citation rate.
Example
This run has 8 valid answers (7 organic, 1 brand verification). A page on your official site appears in 2 answers, and one of those answers cites it three times:
- The URL's citation count is 2 (counted by answer), not 4;
- Per-source citation rate = 2 ÷ 8 = 25%.
With 10 valid answers, the same situation would give 2 ÷ 10 = 20%.
How domains are normalized
Before comparing domains, PeakGEO lowercases them, trims whitespace and drops a leading www., so www.Example.com and example.com are treated as the same domain. Domains are taken from the URLs actually cited whenever possible.
Ownership is based on the website in your brand profile: that domain and its subdomains count as Official website, everything else as Third party. This label only describes who owns a source; it is not a quality judgement.
Where to find it
- Visibility: "Top cited domains" shows the most-cited domains; "Top cited articles" lists official and third-party pages with their citation count and citation rate, and opens the original answers that cited each one.
- Sources: aggregates every domain and page cited across all questions. The "Source ranking" is ordered by citations — open a row to see the questions that cited it — and "Most-cited pages" lists the specific pages models cite most.
- Answer details: every answer shows the sources it actually cited.
Citation frequency is not reliability
A frequently cited source is one the models use often. That says nothing about whether its content is true or the source is reliable.
PeakGEO doesn't score sources for credibility and doesn't label them "trustworthy" or "untrustworthy". Likewise, an answer citing a page doesn't mean the page supports what the answer says. Citation data tells you which sites AI leans on for a given kind of question — useful for deciding where content should live — not how good those sites are.
Share of voice
Share of voice measures your brand's portion of all mentions of your brand and tracked competitors:
Share of voice = organic answers mentioning the entity ÷ sum of answers mentioning the brand and each tracked competitor
Rules:
- Only valid organic answers (organic discovery and organic recommendation) count; brand verification and custom questions don't.
- Tracked competitors are the ones you have confirmed and not excluded in Competitors. Brands that newly appear in AI answers show up as "New competitor candidates" and aren't counted until you confirm them.
- Each brand counts at most once per answer; when one answer names several brands, each of them counts once.
- Competitor names are matched by full name first, then by common aliases. An alias shared by several competitors is treated as ambiguous and isn't attributed.
Share of voice and mention rate are not interchangeable
This run has 10 valid organic answers. Your brand is mentioned in 4, competitor A in 3, competitor B in 2:
| Metric | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Brand organic mention rate | 4 ÷ 10 | 40% |
| Brand share of voice | 4 ÷ (4 + 3 + 2) | about 44.4% |
Mention rate answers "how many answers include the brand"; share of voice answers "among the brands mentioned, how much belongs to us". Share of voice is not market share either.
Why share of voice has no confidence interval
A single answer often names several brands at once, so mentions of different brands aren't independent events and can't be given the single-proportion confidence interval used for mention rate. Share of voice is therefore shown with its value and mention counts only, while mention and recommendation rates keep their 95% confidence intervals.
Unattributed answer share
When an answer names something that looks like a brand but can't be matched to your brand or any tracked competitor, it is shown separately as "Unattributed answer share" and is not part of the share-of-voice denominator. Names recognized as media outlets, institutions or specific products, and names you excluded, are ignored.
Competitor drill-down
Open a competitor's detail view in Competitors to see:
- Competitor-only questions: questions where, in the same organic recommendation answer, the competitor was recommended and your brand wasn't;
- Recommendations by model: how often each model recommended each side in organic recommendation answers;
- for every record, the question, model, original answer text and the sources that answer cited.
Reasons and citations extracted from answers reflect what the model said — they are not verified competitor strengths.
Related: Metric definitions · Comparing runs · Actions