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Citation Share (formerly Share of Search) measures how frequently AI engines cite your domain in their responses. Not just mention your brand name, but actually link to your pages.

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How it’s calculated

Every sampled run counts, and the citations of all runs are pooled before dividing. An answer that cites many sources therefore weighs more than one that cites few, and an answer that cites nothing does not enter the figure. Share of Voice works the other way: it takes your share in each run and averages the runs, counting a run without you as zero. When the answers carry no citations at all, Citation Share has no value: the metric shows as empty on the Overview and your overall score leaves it out. Citations are matched by domain, not by brand name. If an AI engine links to any page on sparkasse.de, that counts toward Sparkasse’s Citation Share regardless of the link’s anchor text. See Mentions, Citations & Sources for how citations differ from mentions and sources. Citation Share, too, is measured on unbranded prompts by default; the Branded filter shows the prompts that name your brand, on their own or together with the rest. On a page’s own view, Citation Share is shown twice: once for that exact page and once for any page of your site, on the same questions. A page can sit at 0% while the site sits well above it. That gap means the engines do cite you, with other pages, and the view lists which ones they picked instead. It is the first thing to read before changing the page.

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Grounding context

Citation Share is shown together with the grounding rate: the share of responses where the engine actually searched the live web before answering. Citations can only exist in grounded responses, so the grounding rate is the ceiling for citation opportunity. If engines rarely ground their answers on a topic, a low Citation Share reflects limited opportunity rather than weak content, and content changes will have less short-term leverage there.

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Citation Share vs. Share of Voice

These two metrics measure different things: You can have SoV without Citation Share: AI mentions your brand by name without linking to your pages. You can also have Citation Share without SoV: your pages are cited as a source in a response that doesn’t mention your brand directly. For how often answers cite each brand’s website, competitors included, see Citation Rate.

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What it tells you

Citation Share is one of the two lead measures on the Overview, with Share of Voice: it reflects how much AI engines trust your domain as a reference. Low Citation Share combined with low Alignment Score usually means your content isn’t structured in a way AI systems can confidently cite.
Since zued audits weekly, Citation Share is a directional indicator, not a real-time measurement. It’s reliable enough to spot trends and compare engines, but take individual data points with a grain of salt.