Citation Share
A brand's share of all citations on a given topic compared to every other source cited.
What is Citation Share?
Citation share is the slice of all citations on a given topic that go to a particular brand, compared to every other website cited for that same topic. If ten AI answers about running shoes collectively include 40 citations and 8 of them point to one brand's site, that brand holds a 20% citation share on the topic. It's a way of measuring which sources an AI system actually trusts enough to link to, not just which brands get talked about.
Why it matters
Citation share is an emerging AI-visibility metric, not a standardized industry measure, and is generally calculated as (a brand's citations on a topic) ÷ (total citations across all sources on that topic) × 100, aggregated across a defined set of tracked prompts and re-checked over time since AI answers and their citations can change between runs. It is a narrower concept than citation domain analysis (which looks at the type of site cited) because it's specifically about competitive share among sources on one topic, functioning as a citation-specific analog to the older marketing metric 'share of voice.' Because citation behavior differs by AI product (some heavily favor UGC platforms like YouTube and Reddit while others lean on the pages ranking well in traditional organic search) a brand's citation share can vary substantially depending on which AI system's answers are being measured. Ranketta tracks citation share per topic as one of its core AI-visibility metrics, alongside share of voice and mention position.