Citation Analysis
Citation Analysis, on the Visibility tab, shows which online sources AI uses when it answers questions about your brand, your competitors and your market. These are the sources currently winning for your prompts.
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- Platform Tutorial
- Last updated
- Read time
- 3 min
Citation Analysis is arguably the most important section in your entire Visibility tab, and one of the most strategically valuable things Parsnipp gives you access to. It answers a question that most brands have never been able to answer before: what sources is AI actually using to form its opinions about your brand, your competitors, and your market?
How AI picks its sources
When an LLM responds to a shopper’s question, it does not generate that answer from thin air. It draws on information from across the internet: your own website, your competitors’ websites, trade publications, thought leadership articles, research reports, social media, reviews, forums, and anywhere else that information about your category lives online. Every answer engine is constantly scanning, ranking, and deciding which of those sources is most trustworthy and most relevant when it comes to formulating a response. The citations Parsnipp surfaces are the sources that are winning that selection process for your brand-relevant prompts.
Why it matters
Understanding your citation landscape is one of the most direct levers you have in generative engine optimization. Once you know which sources AI search is relying on to talk about you, you can start to take action:
- Strengthen the sources that are already working in your favor.
- Identify gaps where competitors are being cited and you are not.
- Build PR and content strategies that target the specific types of earned, owned, and social media that AI platforms are consistently drawing from.
- Begin to understand how AI arrived at the conclusions it has about your brand, including the things that may not be working in your favor.
How it works
Within the Citation Analysis section you can filter citations by the sources used most frequently overall, by earned media, by owned media, and by social media. You can also add competitors directly from the citation view as you discover new brands being cited that you are not yet tracking, and you can download a full CSV of all relevant citations for use outside of Parsnipp.