Signostic Lexicon · AI search visibility
AI Citation
A mention of a source — name, URL, or both — inside an answer engine's response. The currency of the Answer Engine, comparable to rank position on the Search Engine. Discovered by running a fixed prompt set against the major engines and recording which sources are named.
On the Search Engine, the unit of visibility is the rank position. On the Answer Engine, it's the citation — the moment your business is named (or your URL is linked) inside a generated answer. No citation, no visibility for that query.
Citations behave differently from rankings in two ways. They're binary per query — you're either named or you're not, with no gradient between positions 1 and 10. And they're multi-engine — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews each maintain their own attribution patterns, so a citation on one is no guarantee on the rest.
Discovery is mechanical: a fixed prompt set, calibrated to the vertical and region, run against the four engines. Each run records which sources were named, which competitor was named when the audited domain wasn't, and the source the engine attributed the answer to. The Signostic audit reports this as Citation Presence.
- AI Citations
- Answer Engine Citation
- LLM Citation
See AI Citation measured in your domain — the Three-Engine audit.
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