Citation share is the percentage of recorded citations in the selected AI answers that belong to a domain or URL. Use it to compare which sources receive more citations.
Calculation
Citation share (%) = Domain or URL citation count ÷ Total scoped citation count × 100
Citation count measures recorded citation occurrences. It is different from answer count and unique URL count. If one answer cites several pages from the same domain, that domain can receive several citations.
Example
If the selected period and filters contain 1,200 citations and your domain receives 60, its citation share is 5%.
If 36 of those citations point to a product page and 24 to a guide, their URL-level shares are 3% and 2%. These are shares of all scoped citations, not just citations to your domain.
Where to find it
Read Citation share in Cited domains for websites or Cited URLs for individual pages. Keep the period, AI models, and other comparison conditions consistent.
Shares of the visible rows may not add up to 100% when the table shows only part of the results. Pagination or showing a top-source subset does not replace the denominator with just those rows' citation counts.
Read it alongside citation count
- Count and share both increase: the source receives more citations and a larger proportion of the total.
- Count increases, share decreases: the source receives more citations, but total citations grow faster.
- Count stays the same, share increases: citations to other sources may have decreased.
When comparing periods, check for changes in the tracked prompts and model mix. Orchestor combines citation counts across models, so models with more citations have more influence on the result. This can differ from a simple average of model-level percentages.
How it differs from other metrics
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Citation count | Recorded occurrences of citations to a source |
| Citation share | A source's fraction of all scoped citations |
| Share of voice | Your brand's share of mentions across comparison brands |
| Visibility | The fraction of answers that mention the brand |
Citation share is not weighted by website traffic, authority, or citation position within an answer. Subtracting citation share from 100% does not give the percentage of answers without a citation: the denominator is citations, not answers.
What to check next
See Citation rank for how to order the comparison, then open the leading Cited URLs and Answers. Review the cited page and the context in which the answer used it.