Citation Sources
Citation Sources shows who owns the websites cited by monitored AI answers, what kinds of organisations run them, and what kinds of pages are cited. Use it to understand the evidence landscape behind AI visibility and to inspect competitor-owned citations.
Open Citation Sources
Open AI Visibility Dashboard, select a project, then select the Citation Sources tab in the table section. The chart uses citations from the latest eligible processed responses that match the dashboard filters.
Choose a view
Use View to select:
| View | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Relationship | Are citations from your websites, competitor websites, independent sources or unresolved sources? |
| Organisation type | What kind of organisation owns the cited source, such as a publisher, vendor or other classified owner? |
| Page type | What kind of content was cited, such as an article, product page or another classified page type? |
Each bar shows a share and citation count. The note below the chart states the
applicable citation total and covered dates. Relationship uses all eligible
citations. Organisation type and Page type use only citations that have that
classification data, so their denominators can be smaller.
Read Relationship
The Relationship view can contain:
- Independent sources — resolved domains that are not mapped to Your Brands or configured competitors.
- Your websites — resolved domains associated with the monitored brand or project website.
- Competitors — resolved domains associated with configured competitor companies.
- Unresolved source — citations for which no source domain could be resolved. These are shown separately and are not counted as Independent sources.
Select the Competitors bar when it is interactive to see each competitor’s share of the same eligible citation base. Select All sources to return. The bar is only drillable when the current result contains competitor detail.
How competitor matching works
Competitor ownership depends on the companies saved under Default Competitors and the domains that source classification can associate with them. Several observed names can belong to one competitor company. A configured competitor name alone does not guarantee a competitor citation count if no cited domain has been matched to that company.
New or changed competitor settings can require source enrichment to complete before historical citations are reclassified. During that process, counts can temporarily remain under Independent or an unresolved classification.
Read organisation and page types
Organisation type groups resolved sources by the classified owner of the domain. Page type groups citations by the classified purpose of the cited page. Unknown or unclassified entries mean the citation exists but a reliable category is not available yet.
Classification describes the source, not whether the cited claim is accurate, favourable or influential.
Apply dashboard filters
Project, Date Range, Journey Phase, Configuration and
Platform change the citations included. The current Citation Sources module
does not apply the global Provider Position control. After changing an
applicable filter, wait for the module to refresh before comparing bars.
If competitor values are missing
- Open Configure and confirm the intended companies are saved under Default Competitors.
- Expand each competitor group and check that its observed name variants belong to the same company.
- Confirm the monitored answers contain citations to websites owned by those competitors; competitor mentions without competitor-owned citations do not count here.
- Allow any source-enrichment or historical preparation process to finish.
- Reload the dashboard and use a wider Date Range.
If another project works with the same dashboard version, the likely difference is project settings, cited domains, classification coverage or the selected filters rather than the chart control itself.
Other troubleshooting
- Competitors cannot be selected when its count is zero or no competitor detail was returned.
- Unresolved citations cannot be assigned to a relationship until a domain is available.
- Counts can change after classification improves even though the original answer and citation URL remain unchanged.
- A citation to an independent review of a competitor stays Independent; relationship is based on source ownership, not the subject discussed on the page.
- Select Retry if the module reports that it could not be loaded.