Mention and citation are two different wins
Being mentioned means the assistant said your name. Being cited means it also pointed at a source. Citations matter more than they look, because a cited source is the thing the assistant can defend, which makes it more likely to survive into the next answer and more likely to send an actual visitor.
The mistake is to treat citation as a link-building problem. It is closer to a fact-supply problem. The assistant is looking for a page that will let it say something specific without guessing.
What a citable page looks like
- It answers one question, and the question is in the heading.
- The answer is in the first two sentences, before any story or preamble.
- It contains facts that can be checked: a service, a service area, a price band, a response time, a certification, a date.
- It is written as text, not baked into an image, a slider, or a PDF.
- It has a date on it, and the date is real.
Where citations actually come from
Most owners assume directories dominate. Our own citation corpus, aggregated below from every source domain the assistants pointed at across our stored scans, says otherwise. Business and product websites take the largest share, which is the encouraging part: the single biggest bucket of citations is a surface you control outright.
The order that works
Fix your own pages first, because they are free and immediate. Then go after the three or four third-party pages that already rank for the question you want to win, because being added to a page that is already retrieved beats creating a new page nobody retrieves. Reviews and profile completeness run alongside both.
Source-coverage checklist
Work top to bottom. Everything in the first group is inside your control and can be done this week without anyone's permission.
1. Pages you own
- One page per service, with the service name in the H1 exactly as a customer would say it.
- A service-area page or section that lists the towns and neighborhoods in plain text.
- An about page that states the legal name, the trading name if different, the year founded, and the city.
- Hours, phone, and address as text in the footer of every page, not only in an image.
- A short frequently-asked section on each service page, with the answer in the first sentence under each question.
- Prices, price ranges, or an honest explanation of what drives the price. This is one of the most-requested facts and one of the least-published.
2. Profiles that feed everything else
- Google Business Profile: correct primary category, every real secondary category, services listed individually, and a description that names the jobs.
- The same name, address, and phone on every profile, character for character.
- Apple Business Connect and Bing Places, which are cheap to claim and feed different assistants.
- Your trade association or licensing board listing, where one exists. These carry unusual weight because they are checkable.
3. Pages other people own
- Find the three pages that already rank for "best [trade] in [city]" and ask, politely and specifically, to be considered for inclusion.
- Local news, chamber of commerce, and neighborhood association pages.
- Supplier and manufacturer "find an installer" pages, which are frequently retrieved and rarely claimed.
- Any partner whose site lists who they work with.
4. Reviews, treated as content
- Ask for reviews after a specific job, and ask the customer to name the job. Never script the words for them.
- Reply to reviews using the service name, because your reply is part of the readable text.
- Keep a steady trickle rather than a burst. Recency is visible; volume alone is not.
If you only do one thing: publish one page per service, each answering the question a customer would ask about that service in its first two sentences.
23,926
citations recorded in AI answers
798
distinct source domains cited
85%
of them point at a business's own website
Every citation we have recorded, by kind of source
Computed live from 182 stored scans covering 23,926 citations across 798 distinct domains. Assistants were asked real buyer questions unprimed; every source domain they cited or linked was recorded and classified. Full method and sample.
You are looking for the term
Citation rate
The proportion of AI answers about your category that cite a source naming you is called your citation rate, and being the source an answer is built from is what the industry files under answer engine optimization. If you have been told to "do AEO", the checklist above is what that phrase means in practice.
- Does adding an llms.txt file get me cited?
- There is no evidence it does on its own. It is a proposed convention, cheap to add, and no substitute for having pages that state checkable facts.
- Do backlinks still matter?
- Indirectly. A link is one way a page gets retrieved in the first place, but the assistant cites the page because of what it says about you, not because of the link.
- 01AI features and your websiteGoogle Search Central
- 02Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiencesGoogle Search Central
- 03Web search toolOpenAI
- 04Local business structured dataGoogle Search Central
Every link above was opened and confirmed reachable on September 1, 2026.
The automated version
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