Cited rate
Cited rate is the share of sampled AI answers that link to one of your own domains as a source. It measures whether engines treat your site as evidence, which is a different outcome from whether they mention your name.
Named and cited come apart constantly
A brand can be named in an answer built entirely from third-party sources: a review site, a forum thread, a roundup post. The engine knows about you because someone else wrote about you, and your own pages contributed nothing.
The reverse also happens. An engine can cite your documentation as the authority on a technical question while recommending a competitor as the product to buy. Being useful and being chosen are separate outcomes.
Why the distinction earns its column
The two failures have opposite fixes. A low named rate with reasonable citation means engines can read you but the market does not talk about you, which is an earned-mention problem measured in months. A reasonable named rate with near-zero citation means the market talks about you but engines are not reaching your pages, which is usually a retrievability problem you can fix this week.
Related terms
- Named rateNamed rate is the share of sampled AI answers that mention your brand at all, decided by exact word-boundary matching rather than by a model's judgment.
- Supported rateSupported rate is the share of sampled answers that both name your brand and cite one of your own domains in the same answer.
- RetrievabilityRetrievability is whether an AI engine can fetch your page and extract your claims as text.
- Citation targetA citation target is a third-party page that AI engines already cite when answering questions in your category.
Want this measured on your own domain rather than defined? Run a free report and see the rates, with their sample sizes and ranges, for your own buyer questions.