Citation Intelligence Dashboard
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Copilot fragenThe Citation Intelligence dashboard provides deep analysis of how AI platforms cite sources across all your AI Visibility Reports. Understanding citation patterns helps you optimize content to be more frequently cited.
What You'll Learn
In this guide, you'll learn:
- How to interpret citation analytics
- What different citation formats mean
- The difference between sources AI cited in its answer and sources it merely evaluated
- How to find earned media — third-party pages that mention your brand in their content, even when the AI answer never attributes you
- How to identify influential third-party sources and filter them by date, platform, project, citation type, and content mentions
- How to use citation trends for content strategy
- How to create PR projects directly from top citation sources
Prerequisites
Citations are tracked based on the AI Visibility reports you run for the property. If you haven't run a report there will not be any data here to view.
Citation Overview
At the top of the dashboard, you'll see summary metrics:
- Total Citations: How many times sources were cited across all reports
- Owned Media: How many times your domain (or competitor domains you track) was cited
- Non-Owned Citations: All citations that did not come from one of your owned domains. This is the broadest "external coverage" number — it includes press, editorial mentions, review sites, reference sites, and any source we haven't been able to classify into a more specific bucket
- Listicle Citations: Citations from list-format content like "best of" or "top 10" articles
Cited vs. Evaluated Sources
Not every source an AI assistant looks at makes it into the answer. Spyglasses classifies each citation by how it actually relates to the response:
| Citation Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Cited in Answer | The source is referenced in the response text itself — a true citation the user can see. |
| Evaluated Only | The assistant fetched and considered the source while composing its answer, but never referenced it in the response. Being evaluated is still meaningful — it means AI retrieval finds your content — but it isn't visible coverage. |
| Search Result | The source appeared in the assistant's underlying web-search results but wasn't used in the answer. |
| Unclassified | Older citations recorded before type classification existed. |
Use the Citation Type filter in the filter bar to re-slice the entire dashboard by any of these — for example, filter to Evaluated Only to see sources AI reads but doesn't credit, which are often the best candidates for content improvements that convert evaluation into citation.
The Earned Media in AI Answers panel shows the cited-vs-evaluated split at a glance.
Earned Media in AI Answers
Spyglasses fetches the content of cited pages and scans it for mentions of your brand (and your tracked competitors), using the names and aliases configured on the property. This catches something answer-text attribution can't: third-party pages that talk about your brand even when the AI answer never says your name.
The Earned Media panel shows:
- Cited vs. evaluated split — how many citations are true, visible citations
- Third-party sources mentioning your brand — external domains whose cited pages mention you in their content (click this tile to filter the whole dashboard to those citations)
- Hidden earned media — of those sources, how many were never attributed to your brand in any answer text. This is coverage you've earned that AI is reading but not crediting — often the strongest signal of where a small content or PR push can convert silent presence into visible citations
The Mentioned in Content filter offers the same lens as a dropdown: filter to citations whose page content mentions your brand, any tracked competitor, or a specific name.
Content mentions come from fetched page content, so they populate as Spyglasses crawls your citation sources — a newly tracked property (or a source behind aggressive bot protection) may show fewer content mentions than actually exist until fetching completes.
Charts and Analysis
Media Type Distribution
This chart breaks down all of your citations by the kind of source that produced them — not by what kind of page it is, but by the relationship that source has to your brand.
| Media Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Owned Media | A citation from your own domain or one of the competitor domains you've added to the property. |
| Press Coverage | Citations from established press outlets — major national/international newspapers and magazines, and B2B trade publications. |
| Web Articles & Blogs | Citations from open-web articles and blogs that aren't established press — independent blogs, agency content, course providers, partner pages, and most brand-adjacent articles on the wider web. This is the broadest "earned" bucket: it does not specifically mean "mentions of your brand" — to filter by which brand a source mentions, use the Brand Attribution filter on the Third-Party Citation Sources table further down. |
| Review Sites | Review platforms like G2, Capterra, Yelp, Trustpilot. |
| Social & Community | Forums, Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium. |
| Reference Sites | Wikipedia and other reference/encyclopedia sources. |
| Video Platforms | YouTube, Vimeo, embedded video. |
| Unclassified Source | Sources we haven't been able to classify into one of the buckets above. We try to keep this slice as small as possible — see the methodology page for how source classification works. |
A note on the "Non-Owned Citations" KPI vs. the buckets above. The KPI at the top of the dashboard counts every citation that is not from an owned domain. That's a single number. The Media Type Distribution chart then splits those non-owned citations across all of the source-type buckets above (plus owned media). So the KPI total and the sum of all non-owned slices in this chart should match.
Source Authority
This chart groups each cited source by what kind of organization runs it. While Media Type Distribution asks "what role does this source play in coverage?", Source Authority asks "who runs this site?"
| Authority Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Academic | Universities, research institutions, peer-reviewed journals, and major scientific publishers (.edu domains, nature.com, arxiv.org, etc.). |
| Government | Official government sources at any level — federal, state, local, or international (.gov, .gov.uk, europa.eu, etc.). |
| Major Media | Tier-1 mainstream press — large national/international newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks that a non-expert would recognize. |
| Trade Media | Industry-specific publications and B2B trade press — outlets whose audience is professionals in a specific vertical rather than the general public. |
| Industry Analysts | Research and advisory firms, management consultancies that publish research, and elite business publications (Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, HBR, etc.). |
| Professional Orgs | Industry associations, professional bodies, standards organizations, foundations, charities, NGOs, advocacy groups, and other non-profits. |
| Review Aggregators | Platforms whose primary business is collecting and publishing reviews or ratings of products, services, or businesses. |
| Reference/Encyclopedia | Reference and encyclopedia sites — authoritative knowledge bases, dictionaries, and consumer health/medical references. |
| Other Brand Websites | Any commercial brand website that isn't press, reviews, reference, etc. — corporate sites, product/SaaS sites, agencies, ecommerce stores, B2B vendor sites. Also includes a small number of nonprofits we couldn't pin to a more specific bucket. |
If your citations are primarily from lower-authority sources, focus on building presence on higher-authority platforms — major media, trade press, and analyst firms tend to carry the most weight.
Platform Coverage
This chart shows which AI platforms generate the most citations. Understanding which platforms are generating more citations can help you decide which platforms to focus on optimizing for.
Citation Content Formats
This chart groups citations by the editorial format of the cited page — how the content is structured, regardless of who runs the site.
| Format | Description |
|---|---|
| Listicle | Best-of, top-N, or comparison content (e.g. "Top 10 CRM tools", "5 best alternatives to X"). |
| How-To Guides | Tutorials, step-by-step instructions, and walkthrough guides. |
| Reviews | Product or service review content with pros/cons or hands-on assessment. |
| Research | Studies, statistics, original research, and data-driven reports. |
| Case Studies | Customer success stories, before/after walkthroughs, and detailed case studies. |
| News | News articles, press releases, and announcement-style coverage. |
| Reference | Encyclopedia or dictionary-style reference content. |
| Videos | Video content (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.). |
| Podcasts | Podcast episodes or audio content. |
| Other Articles & Pages | Pages that don't match any of the more specific formats above — typically regular informational articles, product/about/service pages, marketing pages, and plain blog posts that aren't formatted as a list, guide, or review. |
Some formats are more likely to generate click-throughs than others. Listicles are a very common format for citations since they naturally describe differences in category options.
Citation Trends Over Time
The trends chart shows how citation patterns change across your report history:
- Rising citations: Your authority is growing
- Stable citations: Maintaining position
- Declining citations: May indicate increased competition or content staleness
Look for correlations between citation trends and:
- New content publication
- Content updates
- Competitor activity
- AI platform changes
You can compare breakdowns over time of different types of citations:
- Earned media vs. owned media
- Media Type
- Source Authority
- Content Format
Top Third-Party Citation Sources
This list shows which external domains are most frequently cited in AI responses, ranked by citation count. The list updates in real time when you change any filter (date range, project, platform, or content format) — so if you narrow the view to a specific platform or date window, the source rankings reflect only that filtered data.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Domain | The cited website |
| Citations | Number of times cited within the active filter window |
| Media types | The content types that were cited from this domain |
Source rows also carry two kinds of brand chips:
- Blue chips — answer-text attribution: which brand the AI's response attributed the citation to
- Teal "In content" chips — brands found in the cited pages' fetched content, whether or not the answer mentioned them
When you expand a source to see its individual citations, each row shows the citation type (Cited in answer / Evaluated only / Search result), and — once the page content has been fetched — the article's author and publish date. Author data is what powers author goals in PR projects.
Using This Data
Outreach Opportunities: High-citation sources in your space are influential. Consider:
- Contributing guest content
- Building relationships for backlinks
- Monitoring their content strategy
Competitive Intelligence: If competitors' domains appear here frequently, study what content gets cited.
Content Gaps: If certain topics are always cited from third parties, you may need to create authoritative content on those topics.
Creating a PR Project from Citation Sources
Each source row has a checkbox. Select any combination of domains you want to monitor and a Create PR Project button appears in the card header showing the count of selected domains. Clicking it takes you directly to the New Project form with:
- Project type pre-set to PR
- All selected domains pre-filled as publisher targets
From there you only need to confirm a name, set a start date, and assign prompts. This is the fastest way to turn "we're being outcompeted on these third-party sites" into a structured PR campaign with tracked goals.
Tip: Use the date range and platform filters first to find the sources that matter most for a specific context — for example, filter to the last 30 days and a single platform to see which publishers are driving citations on that platform right now — then select those sources to create a precisely targeted PR project.
Taking Action
To Increase Your Citation Rate
- Create citable content: Research reports, original data, comprehensive guides
- Add structured data: Help AI understand your content type
- Build authority signals: Backlinks, mentions, social proof
- Update regularly: Fresh content is more likely to be cited
- Cover topics comprehensively: Thin content rarely gets cited
To Appear in More Citation Contexts
- Review which third-party sources get cited
- Create content covering similar topics
- Ensure your content is at least as comprehensive
- Target the specific grounding searches that trigger citations
- Monitor citation trends after publishing
Best Practices
Track Citation Patterns, Not Just Counts
Raw citation counts fluctuate. Focus on:
- Are you being cited for the right topics?
- Are citation contexts positive or neutral?
- Are you gaining share vs. third parties?
Invest in Citable Content Types
Based on media type distribution, prioritize creating content types that get cited. If research reports get cited frequently, invest in original research.
Build Relationships with High-Citation Sources
The top third-party sources are influential in your space. Building relationships can lead to mentions, links, and referral traffic beyond AI citations.
Monitor Competitor Citations
If a competitor suddenly appears in top citations, investigate what content drove this. You may need to respond with your own authoritative content.
Explore citations with an AI assistant (MCP)
Connect the Spyglasses MCP server and ask an assistant to break down your citation mix in conversation. get_citation_intelligence returns the same media-type, authority, format, and page-type breakdowns shown here — including the cited-vs-evaluated split and earned-media rollups — plus a historical series the assistant can chart to show how the mix shifts over time. It supports the same citationType and mentionedBrand filters as the dashboard, so you can ask things like "show me hidden earned media from the last 30 days" directly. The Citation mix over time prompt runs the whole analysis for you.
See MCP → Account data for the full tool reference.
Related
- MCP Server — Break down your citation mix from an AI assistant
- AI Visibility Reports — Run reports to generate citation data
- AI Traffic Analytics — Track when users click through from AI citations
- Projects — Create PR projects from top citation sources and track campaign goals
- Getting Started — Install the tracking plugin