Glossary entry
Citation Rate
Also known as: cite rate, source rate
The proportion of LLM responses to a defined prompt set in which a given source (URL, domain, or brand) appears as a citation. The fundamental GEO metric.
Citation rate is the most fundamental GEO metric: out of N prompts run against an LLM, in how many did a given source appear as a citation?
A formal definition:
For a prompt set P, an LLM L, and a target source S,
citation rate (S, P, L) =
|{p ∈ P : S ∈ cited_sources(L, p)}|/|P|
A citation rate of 0.32 means S was cited in 32% of the prompts in P when run against L. Citation rate is prompt-set-dependent — the same source has a different rate against different prompt sets, which is why methodology disclosure matters.
Two close-but-distinct metrics:
- Mention rate — was the brand mentioned (cited or not)? Useful for brand-awareness contexts.
- Position-weighted citation rate — weights citations by where they appear (first cited source gets 1.0, second gets 0.7, etc.).
We default to flat citation rate on The Cited and disclose any weighting explicitly. See: Methodology for the prompt-set definitions we use.
See also: share-of-voice — citation rate's category-relative cousin.