Citations

A citation is a URL an AI model returns as a source for the answer it just gave. The Citations page collects every citation your tracked prompts produce, groups them by domain, page, query and video, and marks the sources that cite your competitors but never name you.

Open it when you want to know which sites shape AI answers in your category, which of your own pages models actually use as source material, and where the holes are.

Citations is included with every paid plan. Client portal users get a read-only version without the Outreach tab.

What counts as a citation

Ask Perplexity for the best CRM for a small business and it writes a short answer, then lists the links it used underneath. Those links are the citations. ChatGPT does the same in web-search mode, and Google stacks reference pages under every AI Overview.

Three things a citation is not:

• Not a brand mention. A page can be cited without naming you, and a model can name you from training data without citing anything. Read ranked answer mentions on the Prompts page; Perception covers descriptions and claims.
• Not a Google rank. Position in a citation list is not a SERP position, and small changes in wording reshuffle it. The presence of the source is the signal, not its slot.
• Not a link to you. Most of your citations are pages on other people's sites. Your own domain is one source among many, and rarely the biggest.

The page that ranks for a query is often not the page that gets cited. A model asked about marathon running shoes pulls a Wirecutter review, a Runner's World guide and a Reddit thread, then writes from the lot. Citations and search rankings describe different evidence. Compare the actual sources for the prompt you care about.

Where the data comes from

Three AI surfaces return sources with their answers, and Trakkr captures all three.

The citation views report sources observed for your active prompts. URLs are grouped by page and domain, with source type and brand-mention evidence where a page could be assessed. Read the first and last seen dates alongside the current scope.

The other tracked models do not show their working. Claude, Gemini and the rest still shape visibility, but they return no source list, so no citations. Claude is marked as coming soon on the platform filter.

How each citation is classified

Every cited domain is tagged with one of eight source types: Owned, Earned Media, Social, Reviews, Institution, Competition, PR Wire, and Other. Source Type explains these labels. They describe the kind of source, not a guaranteed weight assigned by an AI model.

Each cited page also carries:

• whether the page mentions your brand (citing you, not mentioned, or not checked), which is what turns it into a gap
• sentiment toward your brand: positive, neutral or negative
• the tracked prompts and the search queries that surfaced it
• the competitors named on the same page
• a domain rating, plus the first and last dates the URL was seen

Every page gets one of three results for your brand:

• Citing you: something from the page names you. That can be the page's own text, a quote an AI engine took from it (Perplexity and Google AI Overviews send one with many citations), its title, or its address. Hover the dot to see the exact words and where they came from.
• Not mentioned: Trakkr read the page and your brand isn't on it. The hover shows when it was read and how many words it had. Only these pages count as gaps.
• Not checked: the page hasn't been read yet, or it couldn't be read. Some sites block automated reading (G2, Gartner, Capterra and Reddit do), some pages need a sign-in, and search results or PDFs have no fixed page text. The hover says which, and when Trakkr tries again. A page that isn't checked never counts as a gap. If an AI answer later quotes it naming you, it moves to citing you.

Use the assessment date to judge whether a mention check reflects the page you see today. To request another read, right-click the page or open its ⋯ menu and choose Recheck page. Follow the pending or completed state shown on the page. You can request one recheck per page in 24 hours, up to 20 pages per brand in that window. If a recheck cannot read the page, an earlier verdict may remain; check the evidence date.

Every source also carries its Domain Rating, and Citation Intent shows the buyer intent behind the queries that produced each citation.

The four tabs

Sources holds three sub-views of the same data (Domains, Pages, Feed), switched with the pills on the right of the tab row. The old Heatmap grid was retired; ?view=heatmap now lands on Sources, where the Gaps filter covers the same job.

Sources: domains, pages and the feed

Domains

The default view. Every citation is grouped by domain, so you read publications rather than raw URLs. Three filter tabs sit above the list: All shown, Citing (domains with a page that names you), and Gaps (domains AI cites where no page mentions you). Inside Gaps, a second control narrows further to Sites citing competitors but not you.

Sort by Most cited, Highest authority, Best sentiment, Most pages, or Most competitors.

Click a domain to open its profile on the right: citations over time, the specific pages being cited, the prompts behind them, sentiment, the competitors present, and a plain-language takeaway. On a gap domain the profile ends with a Suggested block and a Draft outreach button that hands the domain straight to Outreach.

Pages

Pages flattens the same data to individual URLs. One canonical guide on a domain often drives half its citations while a dozen other pages on the same site contribute almost nothing, and only this view shows you that.

The pills across the top double as filters: pages, your pages, citing you, gaps, and not checked when any exist. Your pages is the useful corrective. The list of your own content that models actually use is short for nearly everyone, and rarely the pages you expected. It also appends pages that hold a top-ten Google rank and have never been cited by AI, taken from Search Console.

When a cited URL already has a page record, an open-record icon appears on hover and a journey rail shows its stages. That link opens the full record in Pages, where citation evidence sits beside work and history.

Feed

A chronological log of what changed between snapshots, over a 7, 14 or 30 day range.

Read the Feed weekly on the 7-day range. It is the quickest way to catch lost coverage, a competitor taking a page you used to own, or the first results of a PR push.

Queries: the questions behind the citations

Every citation traces back to the prompts and search queries that triggered it, and Queries reads from that direction. Each query is classified by intent (Discovery, Comparison, Best For, Alternative, or Recommendation), and each intent is satisfied by a different kind of page. Missing from Alternative queries is usually a content gap, not a brand problem.

Pills filter the list to queries, citing you, gaps, winnable, and new, with a Coverage readout for the share of tracked queries that cite you. Sort by Opportunity score, Gaps first, Most frequent, Most competitors, Most citations, or Newest. Switch between a flat List and Group by intent, and narrow to an Audience when the brand has personas.

Two handoffs live on each row. Create content opens the composer in Content prefilled with the query, its intent and the competitors winning it. Open prompt page appears when the query maps to a prompt you already track, and goes to that prompt's detail page.

Videos

A gallery of the videos AI cites when answering questions about your category, mostly YouTube. Pills filter to videos, mention you, yours, competitor, and inaccurate; sort by Most cited, Most prompts, Recently seen, Best sentiment, or Most viewed. Use it to find the channels shaping answers in your category, and the clips that get you wrong.

Whether a video mentions you is judged from its title, channel name and description, so a brand named only out loud in the video is not counted.

A video is marked inaccurate only when a web search confirms that what it says about you is wrong or out of date.

Scope, filters and export

Three controls in the page header scope every tab at once. Location appears when the brand tracks more than one market. The platform chip limits the page to ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews or Perplexity, and only shows when at least two platforms have data. Tags limit the page to citations from tagged prompts. Anything active shows as a chip under the tabs, so counts never move without saying why.

Export gives you the current tab's full set in scope, not the filtered view: All sources, All pages, All queries, or the feed. Detailed citations, one row per query by cited page, is available from every tab.

Investigate a citation

1. 1.Select the right brand, market, platform and tags. Note the scope and source dates so you can return to the same evidence.
2. 2.Open Sources → Pages and find the URL. Use your pages, citing you, gaps or not checked to narrow the list.
3. 3.Inspect the brand-mention indicator. Hover it for the exact words and where they came from. A quote from the AI result and a read of the live page are different pieces of evidence.
4. 4.Open the source URL and compare what it says now with the stored evidence. Check the page title, redirects and whether the relevant text needs a sign-in.
5. 5.Use Queries to find the questions behind the source. Open prompt page is available where a query maps to a tracked prompt. Read the model result: a cited URL does not by itself mean the answer recommended your brand.
6. 6.If the page changed, choose Recheck page from its row menu. A Not checked result is unknown, so do not count it as a confirmed omission.
7. 7.Choose the next step from the evidence. For your page, open its record in Pages if available. For an independent publisher that omits you, review Outreach. For a misleading claim, check Accuracy or Perception.

Keep a short note of the URL, question, model, date and exact evidence. That is enough to explain the finding to a teammate without claiming that one source caused the whole answer.

A weekly pass

1. 1.Open Sources, filter to Gaps, and refine to sites citing competitors but not you. Read the top three domains and click into the pages being cited.
2. 2.Open Queries, filter to gaps, sort by Opportunity score. Pick one or two and either create content for them or work the domains that answer them.
3. 3.Open Feed on the 7-day range. Scan for lost coverage and new competitors, and click through to anything that looks wrong.

Common questions

What is the difference between a citation and a mention?

A citation is a URL the model returned as a source. A mention is your brand name appearing in the answer text. A Wirecutter review can be cited without your brand being named in the answer, and a model can name you from training data without citing anything at all. Citations tracks the URLs. Read ranked answer mentions in Prompts, and brand descriptions in Perception.

Why is one of my pages cited often and another never?

Inspect the specific buyer question and the cited alternatives. Clear answers, relevant evidence and readable pages are useful things to check, but Trakkr cannot prove why an engine selected one source. Open Sources → Pages and filter to your pages to see the evidence for your own URLs.

How fresh is the data?

Citations updates with completed reports. The Feed compares recorded snapshots; first and last seen dates show when a URL was observed. A changed or newly published page may take time to appear, and a citation is not guaranteed.

The source-mention check has its own evidence date. Use Recheck page when the live page differs from that evidence, and inspect the result before calling it a gap.

Why does a page say "Not checked" when I know we're listed on it?

Some sites block automated reading, so Trakkr can't open the page to look. It won't guess that you're missing, so the page stays out of your gaps. When Perplexity or Google AI Overviews cite the page with a quote that names you, it shows as citing you with that quote.

Why does Perplexity return more citations than the others?

By design. Perplexity attaches a citation list to almost every answer, Google AI Overviews attach a handful of references, and ChatGPT Search varies a lot. Read the platform filter as a coverage check rather than a scoreboard: the question is whether each surface cites you at all, not which produces the biggest number.

Where did the Heatmap view go?

It was retired. The grid showed which brands were cited on which sources, and the Gaps filter in Sources answers the same question more directly, with the competitor refinement on top. Old ?view=heatmap links now open Sources.

Where do I act on a citation gap?

Two places. The Outreach tab turns publisher gaps into a working queue with a researched pitch for each one. Citation gaps also arrive as Suggested actions with the source page, evidence and work type attached, and those carry a measurement window into Results.