Position-Adjusted Word Count (PAWC)
Position-Adjusted Word Count is a research measure of how much of an AI answer comes from one source, giving more weight to sentences near the top.
Position-Adjusted Word Count, or PAWC, is a way of measuring how much of an AI answer comes from one source. It counts the words in the sentences that cite the source, and gives sentences near the top of the answer more weight than sentences near the bottom.
You'll mostly meet it in research about optimizing for AI answers. It's useful to know because it asks a better question than "was my page cited?": how much of the answer did my page shape, and how early?
Where it comes from
PAWC was defined in the 2023 paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, which introduced generative engine optimization. The authors needed a way to score a source's visibility inside an answer, and plain citation counts were too blunt.
How it works
Take an answer and split it into sentences. For each sentence that cites your source, take its word count and shrink it according to how far down the answer it sits. The first sentence keeps most of its weight, and later ones keep less. Add these up and divide by the total words in the answer.
If a sentence cites more than one source, its words are split between them. The scores of all the sources in one answer add up to one.
For example, say an answer about coffee subscriptions has 10 sentences. Fernhill's page is cited in the first two, which are long. Kestrel's page is cited in two short sentences near the end. Both pages are cited twice, but Fernhill's PAWC is much higher, because more of the answer's words, and the earlier ones, come from it.
Why it's a research measure
To work out PAWC you need to know which sentence each source supports. Most platforms don't say that. They list sources for the whole answer, or put a link at the end of a paragraph. So PAWC works well in an experiment, where researchers control the setup, and is harder to apply to everyday answers.
AnswerOrbit doesn't report PAWC. We report your position, the order in which brands are named in an answer, and citations, the share of answers that used a page from your site. What the numbers mean explains each one.