Citation hijacking
Citation hijacking is when an AI answer credits your content, data or idea to a different website.
Citation hijacking is when an AI answer uses your content and credits someone else for it. Your survey results, your guide or your product description appear in the answer, with a link to a different site that copied or rewrote them.
You did the work, and someone else gets the citation, the visit and the credibility. Over time, the platforms may come to see that other site as the source on your subject.
How it happens
It usually starts with someone republishing your work. A news site writes up your research. A reseller copies your product descriptions. A content farm rewrites your guide. When a platform searches for the subject, it may find their copy first, or find it easier to read, and cite it.
Some common reasons their copy wins:
- Their page is easier for bots to read, for example because your original is drawn by scripts or sits in a PDF
- Their site ranks higher in the search results the platform reads
- Their version is shorter and states the key facts more plainly
- Your original isn't dated, so theirs looks newer
An example
Fernhill Coffee runs a survey of 2,000 coffee drinkers and publishes the results as a PDF. A trade site writes an article about it, with the main figures in plain text. When someone asks an AI platform how many people in the UK drink coffee every day, the answer quotes Fernhill's figure and links to the trade site. Fernhill isn't mentioned.
How to protect your work
Publish the key findings as a normal web page, in text, with a clear title and date, before or alongside any PDF. Ask anyone who reports on your work to link to the original. Make your page the clearest and most complete version, so it's the one worth citing.
In AnswerOrbit
The Pages tab in Sources shows every page the answers used for your prompts. If a page that rewrites your work shows up there more often than your own, that's a sign the citation is going to the wrong place.