If you are going to report on AI citations, the first thing to pin down is what you are counting. The word gets used loosely enough that two teams can report the same month and produce numbers that differ by an order of magnitude.
Three things people mean
- A mention: the engine says your brand name, with no source attached.
- A link: the engine lists your URL among its sources, whether or not it drew on it.
- A citation: the engine quotes or names a specific piece of content while answering.
The third is the only one that tells you a particular piece of content did work. The first two tell you the engine knows you exist.
The counting rule matters too
Answers are not stable. Ask the same question twice and you can get two different responses, so a naive counter will inflate quickly. Counting once per answer, per engine, per day keeps the number honest and comparable week to week.
It also means a flat week is real information rather than noise. If a placement stops being quoted, you want that to show up as a drop, not get lost inside a churning total.