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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

Citation Share = Your domain citations ÷ Total citations in all responses × 100
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.

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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:
Share of VoiceCitation Share
What it countsYour brand name mentioned in textYour domain URL cited as a source
What it signalsBrand presence in AI conversationsDomain authority as an AI source
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.

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What it tells you

Citation Share is a secondary metric that 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.