AI Citation Tracker

Summary#

AI Citation Tracker runs twelve category prompts through every connected AI engine, collects every source domain those answers cite, ranks them by citation count, and tells you where your own domain stands — or that it is absent.

Purpose#

Being mentioned in an AI answer and being cited by one are different things, and the second is the one you can influence directly. Assistants that show their sources are telling you exactly which pages they trust in your category. This tool turns that into a ranked list, so the question "how do we get into AI answers" becomes "which of these twenty domains do we need to appear on".

Overview#

Enter a brand or domain. Metric Vault builds twelve category prompts — grounded on your real ranking keywords and recent news, never containing your brand name — and sends each to every engine it has a live connection to: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overview. It reads the sources attached to each answer, tallies every cited domain across every engine, and ranks them.

Your own domain is matched against that tally, which is why entering the domain rather than the brand word matters.

Everything reported is a count of citations actually returned. The sidebar entry carries a NEW badge; see Tool status badges.

Benefits#

• A single ranked list of the domains AI engines treat as authoritative in your category.
• Your own citation count, share and rank stated plainly, including when it is zero.
• Per-engine totals show which assistant cites widely and which relies on a few sources.
• Turns AI visibility work into an outreach and placement list you can hand to a person.
• Pairs with backlink work — the same domains often serve both goals.

Use Cases#

• Placement strategy. You need to know which five sites to appear on to be reachable by AI answers in your category.
• Displacement planning. One reference dominates the citations; you decide whether to out-publish it or get onto it.
• Engine diagnosis. Prompt Tracking shows a weak engine; this tool shows which sources that engine leans on.
• Digital PR briefing. The ranked domain list becomes the target list for an outreach campaign.
• Progress check. After a placement goes live you re-run to see whether the citation count moved.

Requirements#

• A signed-in account and a paid plan; Free covers the zero-credit technical tools only.
• One credit available. See How credits work.
• A brand or domain established enough for category prompts to be generated.

Permissions#

Plan decides access; team role does not.

Cost#

1 credit per run. The button reads Track AI Citations · 1 report; the charge is 1 credit, the default rate for tools without an entry in the published price list.

It is a light tool: recorded in your usage but never blocked when the monthly premium allowance is spent, and subject to the 100 light-tool calls per hour fair-use limit. A shared-cache hit still charges 1 credit; the cache holds this tool's data for one day. Reopening a saved result is free. See How credits work and Result caching and freshness.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → AI Visibility → AI Citation Tracker

Inputs#

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Open Dashboard → AI Visibility → AI Citation Tracker.
2. Type your domain into the input marked brand or domain (e.g. nike.com). Pressing Try sample instead fills nike.com and runs it straight away, which costs a credit.
3. Click Track AI Citations, or press Enter in the input field.
4. If you have run this brand before, choose Open saved result (free) or Run fresh (1 credits).
5. Wait while twelve prompts run against every connected engine and their sources are collected.
6. Read the headline first — it states your rank or your absence — then the KPI row.
7. Work down the Who AI cites list and mark the domains you could realistically appear on.

Reading the Results#

The headline is the whole result in one line. When your domain was cited it reads You rank #N of M cited sources, with the citation count, the number of engines queried and your share of all citations. When it was not, it reads Your domain is not cited yet, naming how many engines and prompts were checked. Both are useful; the second is the more common starting point and is not an error.

The four KPI tiles.

• Total citations — every citation returned, counted across all prompts and engines. A low total means the engines answering your category mostly answer without sources, which caps what this tool can tell you.
• Unique sources — how many distinct domains were cited. Read it against the total: 60 citations across 8 domains is a concentrated, winnable pool; 60 across 45 domains means no single placement will move much.
• Your citations — how many of those citations point at your domain, with your rank beneath when you have one, or not cited.
• Your share — your citations as a percentage of all citations. In a concentrated category, single-digit share while a rival sits at 20% is a clear gap.

Who AI cites is the ranked table and the reason to run the tool — up to fifteen domains, ordered by citation count, each with its share and the engines that cited it. Your own domain is marked when it appears. Read it in three passes:

1. The top three. These are the references the models return to. Decide for each whether you can appear on it, or whether you would have to publish something better.
2. The middle. Domains cited a few times each are usually reachable — a contributed article, a listing, a review, a documentation mention.
3. The engine chips. A domain cited by every engine is worth more than one cited by a single engine, because a placement there pays off everywhere.

By engine shows, for each assistant, how many citations it produced and how many distinct sources it drew on. Engines differ sharply here: some cite heavily, some answer from internal knowledge and cite almost nothing. An engine with a low citation count is not a place where citations will fix your visibility — for that engine the lever is broad presence, which is what Prompt Tracking measures.

Insights closes the report. It states your citation position when you have one, says plainly that your domain is not cited when it is not, and names the most-cited source as the reference to displace. When no engine returned any citation at all it says so and explains that some models answer without citing, rather than showing an empty table with no reason.

The recommendation panel below can turn the list into a step-by-step plan; see Get Recommendations.

Examples#

Screenshots#

![screenshot](placeholder: The AI Citation Tracker screen with the brand or domain (e.g. nike.com) input and the Track AI Citations button)

Tips#

• Always enter the domain. A brand word cannot be matched against a cited source list.
• Judge the source pool before the plan. Concentrated pools reward placement; wide pools reward publishing.
• Cross-check the top domains against Link Prospector — a domain that is both an AI source and a link target is worth twice the effort.
• Note your rank and share on each run. Rank moves before share does, and share moves before the answer text does.

Best Practices#

• Run this alongside Google AI Overview Tracker. Together they cover Google's AI answer and every other engine's sources.
• Re-run about a month after a placement goes live. Engines need time to pick up new sources.
• Keep the brand term identical between runs so the generated prompts, and therefore the source pool, stay comparable.
• Treat a 0 citation count as the normal starting point for a brand new to a category, and measure progress by rank appearing at all.

Common Mistakes#

• Reading a zero total as a broken run. Some engines answer without citing anything; the insight block says so explicitly.
• Entering a brand word instead of a domain. Your citations will read zero even when you are cited.
• Treating citations as backlinks. A citation is a source an assistant showed in an answer. It may or may not be a link you can acquire.
• Chasing the top source unconditionally. Some references are not reachable; the middle of the list is often the faster win.
• Comparing citation counts between two runs with different prompts. Change the prompt set and the source pool changes with it.

Limitations#

• Twelve prompts per run.
• Fifteen cited domains shown in the table, although the totals count all of them.
• Only engines Metric Vault has a live connection to are queried, and the report names them.
• Engines that answer without sources contribute nothing to the tally, so coverage depends on which engines are connected.
• Citation matching is by registrable domain, so a citation on a subdomain or a partner site does not count as yours.
• The result is cached for one day, so a same-day re-run may not re-measure.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

What counts as a citation? A source domain returned alongside an AI answer to one of the tracked prompts. Each occurrence is counted once per engine per prompt, and the totals are the sum across all of them.

Why is my domain not listed when the assistant clearly mentions my brand? Because mention and citation are separate. The models frequently name brands from internal knowledge without listing any source. Use Prompt & Question Research for mentions and this tool for sources.

Which engines cite the most? It varies and the By engine section reports it for your run. As a rule, engines built around live retrieval cite heavily; engines answering from internal knowledge cite little.

Does a cached result still cost a credit? Yes. A shared-cache hit charges 1 credit. Only reopening your own saved result is free.

Is this available on the Free plan? No. It needs a paid plan, then keeps working after your monthly premium allowance is spent because it costs fewer than 3 credits. See Quotas and rate limits.