Named and cited are different wins
Appearance Rate counts the runs whose answer names a brand. Citation Rate counts the runs whose answer uses the brand’s website as a source. The two often diverge: an engine can name a brand from what it already knows without linking to it, and it can build an answer on a brand’s pages without naming the brand in its text. They also call for different work. Being named is about how the engines describe your market; being cited is about whether your pages are the ones they trust to answer from. That is why zued shows the two side by side and never adds them together. A combined figure could rise because either one moved, and you could not tell which. Share of Voice stays based on the names in the answer text. A citation is not a share of the conversation, so it never changes Share of Voice.How a citation is matched to a brand
A citation counts for a brand when it points to the brand’s website, its subdomains included. Your own website, and the websites you set for your brands on the Brands screen, always count for you. For other brands, zued uses the website it found and verified for that brand. Sometimes one website belongs to several names, for example a company’s site that is also the only known site of its products or branches. A citation of that site is evidence for the company, not for one product or branch in particular. It counts for the name the site is named after, and in the brand view for the brand group it belongs to. A product or branch whose only site is the company’s shows shared domain instead of a rate, as does every name on a site named after none of them.When there is no number
Citation Rate shows a percentage only when it was measured, never a 0 in its place:- no domain: zued does not know a website for this name yet.
- shared domain: the name’s only website is also another name’s (see above).
- no data: citations are not stored for the view you are looking at. Citation Rate starts with the audits from late August 2026, when citations were recorded for every engine. Earlier snapshots show no data rather than a number that would mix a recording gap with a real change.
Grounding context
Only answers where the engine searched the web can cite anything, so the grounding rate is the ceiling for every brand’s Citation Rate on a topic. Compare brands within the same view rather than reading a low rate on its own.Citation Rate vs. Citation Share
Cards in an answer, such as shopping results or map listings, are not counted as citations.
Like Appearance Rate, Citation Rate is measured per prompt and engine across repeated runs, then averaged. Use it to compare brands and to track trends between audits.