Citation
When an AI answer credits or quotes your page as a source. To be cited, your claims usually need to be specific and backed by identifiable evidence the system trusts.
Updated August 21, 2026
A citation is the payoff of GEO: the model not only read your page but chose it as the source worth naming. Specific, verifiable claims — numbers, dates, named sources — are cited far more often than broad marketing copy. Trust signals like a real about page, contact details and references raise the odds a model is willing to attribute an answer to you.
Related terms
- Trust signals. Checkable evidence that you are a real, accountable business. This includes an about page, contact and legal details, references or case studies, and claims backed by sources. AI systems favor accountable pages over anonymous ones.
- Sourceability. How usable your content is as a source. It asks whether there are concrete facts and figures, attributed claims, and information laid out in extractable structures like tables and lists.
- AI answer engine. A tool that answers a question with written text instead of a list of links, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI overviews. It builds its answer partly from information it reads on websites.