Definition
An LLM citation is a link or named source that an AI assistant shows alongside its answer to indicate where the information came from.
LLM citation explained
When AI assistants answer using live web results, they often show their sources: numbered footnotes in Perplexity, source links in ChatGPT search, and supporting links in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Each of those is a citation, and it is the closest thing AI search has to a ranking position.
Citations and mentions are different. A mention means the assistant names your brand in the text of its answer. A citation means one of your pages is listed as a source. You can be cited without being recommended (your blog post explains a concept, but a competitor is named as the solution), and mentioned without being cited (the model names you from what it learned in training).
Pages that get cited tend to answer a specific question directly, contain facts that are easy to quote, such as definitions, steps, specifications or original data, and are open to the assistant's crawler. Original research is especially citable, because it is the only place a particular finding exists.
Example
Your brand publishes a study of why shoppers abandon online checkouts. When someone asks Perplexity “why do shoppers abandon carts”, the answer quotes one of your findings and lists your study as source 1. That footnote is an LLM citation.
Why it matters
Citations send qualified referral visits and show that the assistant treats your page as a trusted source on the topic, which tends to carry over to related questions.
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Related terms
- CitabilityCitability is how easy it is for an AI assistant to lift a passage from your page and quote it as a trustworthy, self-contained answer.
- Brand mentionA brand mention is any reference to your company, product or founder by name on another website, forum, video or AI answer, whether or not it links to you.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)GEO (generative engine optimization) is making your brand easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini to find, trust and cite.
- AI share of voiceAI share of voice is the proportion of relevant AI assistant answers that mention your brand, compared with how often they mention your competitors.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) is when an AI system first retrieves relevant documents, then has a language model write its answer from them.