GlossaryAI citation
What is AI citation?
An AI citation is an assistant naming or linking your page in its answer. It is the outcome that AI search crawling and live fetching lead to, and the only part of the chain that can send a person to your site.
Also called: AI referral, assistant citation.
The chain runs in order: an ai search crawler indexes the page, a person asks a question, the assistant searches its index, a live fetch reads the page to answer, and the answer cites it. Some of the people who see the citation click through, and those clicks are the only step web analytics ever sees, as a referral from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai.
Server logs show the earlier steps. A page that is fetched live by assistants and never gets a referral is being consumed inside the assistant; a page that starts getting live fetches is often days or weeks ahead of the referrals that follow.
The log cannot show the citation itself, only the fetches around it. agenttraffic reports what was fetched and by whom, and leaves the inference to you.
Related terms
- Live fetch: A live fetch is a request an AI assistant makes for a page right now, because a person in a conversation asked something the assistant needs that page to answer.
- AI search crawler: An AI search crawler is a crawler that builds the index an AI assistant searches and cites from.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO): Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a site more likely to be found, read and cited by AI assistants, the way search engine optimization does for search engines..
Published 2026-09-21, updated 2026-09-21.