Citation coverage
Citation coverage is the share of AI answers that cite a given website at least once.
Citation coverage is the share of AI answers that cite a particular website at least once. If 100 answers to your prompts come back and 30 of them link to your site, your citation coverage is 30%.
It tells you how widely a site is used across the answers. A site with high coverage turns up again and again, across many questions. That's usually a sign the platforms see it as a go-to source for your subject.
Coverage vs citation share
Coverage counts answers. Citation share counts links. They can tell quite different stories.
For example, say Fernhill Coffee's prompts get 100 answers with 800 links between them. Fernhill's site is linked in 30 of those answers, once each. Its coverage is 30%, but its citation share is only 30 out of 800 links, under 4%.
A big review site might be linked 120 times, but in just 6 answers that each link a whole page of its reviews. Its citation share is 120 out of 800, or 15%, and its coverage only 6%.
High coverage with a low share means you're present in many answers as one source among many. A high share with low coverage means a few answers lean on you heavily, and the rest ignore you.
Which one to watch
For your own site, coverage is usually the more useful of the two. It's closest to the question you care about: when someone asks, how often does the answer use my pages? Watch share as well, so you notice when a few sources start to crowd out the rest.
In AnswerOrbit
Our citations number is the share of answers that used a page from your website. Under it you'll find your citation share and how many times your pages are linked in each answer that used them. The Domains tab in Sources shows how many answers used each website and how many times it was linked.