# Citation share

Citation share is the fraction of an answer engine's citations that go to a given domain or brand across a set of queries — the emerging visibility metric of AI search, where being cited replaces being ranked.

The metric is measured two ways. Third-party tools sample queries at scale and count who the engines cite — the approach behind the published rankings of most-cited domains. And the engines themselves have begun shipping first-party numbers, which replaces estimation with measurement wherever it is available.

Its caveats are structural. Citation share is engine-specific: the same content earns different shares in different engines. It is model-sensitive: results shift when the engine swaps the model underneath. And methodology varies by measurer — query sets, geographies, and counting rules differ, so numbers from different sources rarely reconcile cleanly.

**What is citation share?** Citation share is the fraction of an answer engine's citations that go to a given domain or brand across a set of queries — the emerging visibility metric of AI search.

**How is citation share measured?** Two ways: third-party tools sample queries at scale and count who the engines cite, and Bing Webmaster Tools reports it first-party in preview. Numbers from different measurers rarely reconcile — methodology, query sets, and the engine's model all move them.

**What is a citation share metric?** A per-engine percentage: of all sources an AI engine cited for a query set, the share belonging to one domain. It is observational — a citation is not a click.

Canonical: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/glossary/citation-share/
From the Anything Engine Optimization glossary — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/glossary/