Citations and sources
Where citation data comes from, the difference between quoted and listed, and how sources roll up to domains.
Citations are the evidence trail behind an answer: the sources an engine displayed when it wrote one. They are the most actionable data in the platform, because a citation is a page you can influence.
Where the data comes from
Citations are read from the captured answer itself — the sources the engine actually showed, in the order it showed them.
Geonimo does not scrape cited pages to infer citations, and does not ask a model to guess which sources it used. Both are slow and unreliable; the rendered answer is neither.
Coverage varies by engine because each surface displays sources differently: AI Overviews carries a source panel plus inline references, Perplexity cites natively, ChatGPT differs again. Compare citation data within an engine over time rather than across engines in a snapshot.
Quoted versus listed
The distinction the citation data is built around.
- Quoted (inline) — the source was cited against a specific claim in the answer body. The engine attributed a sentence to that page.
- Listed — the source appeared in the panel beside the answer. The engine is saying it read the page.
These are not the same achievement, and they barely overlap in practice — measured across captured AI Overviews, on the order of 9 panel URLs against 134 inline references in the same corpus. Collapsing them into one list throws away most of the signal.
Being quoted is what moves an answer. Being listed is worth having and is not the same thing.
Each citation also carries its rank — the order it appeared in — and a source can be both quoted and listed.
Sources and domains
Citations normalize into two levels:
- Source — a specific URL, with its title and when it was first and last seen in your answers.
- Domain — the site it belongs to, with its type (Editorial, Directory, Community, Docs, Blog, Marketplace).
Domains tell you where influence concentrates and drive outreach strategy. Sources tell you which individual page is doing the work, which is what you pitch, correct or compete with. Both views are in Sources.
Citation index
The Citation Index on the Overview measures citation share per entity across cited sources — how often each brand's own pages are the ones being read.
This chart is currently fed by sample data: citations are not yet attributed to individual entities. It is captioned as such in the interface. Real citation data is on the Sources tab today. See Product status.
The pattern it will show, once attributed, is worth understanding in advance:
| Pattern | Reading |
|---|---|
| High visibility, high citation share | Strong. Engines know you and read you. |
| High visibility, low citation share | Fragile. Engines describe you through other people's pages, which you cannot edit. |
| Low visibility, high citation share | Your pages are trusted for the topic but not associated with your brand as an answer. |
| Low, low | Start with Pages. |
Making your pages citable
Citations follow structure. Properties that recur on pages engines quote:
- A direct, self-contained answer near the top — engines extract passages, not documents
- Clean heading hierarchy so passages have boundaries
- Structured data where it applies, especially FAQ markup on question-shaped content
- Explicit comparisons that name alternatives, for comparison prompts
- Current dates and current facts
- Content in the HTML, not assembled by client-side script
Third-party citations
Most categories are decided partly by pages you do not own. That is not a failure of your content — it is how buyers behave, and engines follow.
Two responses, both legitimate:
- Earn presence on the domains that already decide your category. PR Opportunities ranks them from your own citation data.
- Correct what is wrong on the pages already cited. A stale price or a wrong feature claim on a widely-read directory costs more than a missing blog post, and takes an email to fix.