Measuring visibility

Citation gap

The sources that cite your competitors and have never cited you.

AI answers cite sources. Those citations are where the answer’s opinion of your market came from. If a domain is cited repeatedly for prompts in your category and has never mentioned you, that is not a metric. That is a task.

What it does

Across every answer in a scan we collect every cited URL and its domain, then split them three ways:

• Sources that cite you. Your existing footprint in AI answers.
• Sources that cite a competitor and not you. The gap.
• Sources that cite nobody tracked. Context, usually category explainers.

The middle bucket is the output. It is a list of specific domains, each one already proven to influence answers in your market, ranked by how often it is cited.

Why it beats a backlink list

A backlink tool tells you who links to a competitor. That set is enormous and most of it does nothing.

The citation gap is smaller and pre-qualified: every domain on it has already been pulled into an AI answer about your category. You are not guessing that a placement might matter. You are looking at the ones that demonstrably did.

For an agency this is the most directly sellable artefact in the product, because it converts into a work order without interpretation: here are eleven publications shaping what AI says about your market, and you are absent from all of them.

What to do with it

Roughly in order of effort:

1. Listicles and roundups: “best X in Y” pages. Often just an email away. These are cited constantly.
2. Comparison and review sites: a claimed, complete profile.
3. Category publications: the trade press for your market.
4. Your own pages: sometimes the gap is that a page exists but is not legible to a crawler. That is the cheapest fix on the list.

A caveat worth stating

Citation share is not attribution. A domain being cited often does not prove that getting listed there will move your visibility. It proves the engines read it. That is a strong signal, not a guarantee, and we would rather say so than sell it as a certainty.