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A mention is a brand named in the text of an AI answer; a citation is a source the answer links to, and it exists only when the assistant grounds its answer in web results. The two are counted differently, come from different surfaces, and a brand can have one without the other.
A mention is what the buyer reads: "for a small team, consider Acme or Beta". It comes from whatever the model learned plus whatever was retrieved for that answer. A mention can be a recommendation (the brand was named in an open question) or a recognition (the buyer typed the brand's name and the model described it). A mention is the unit that decides whether the brand is in the consideration set.
A citation is a link the answer attaches as its source. Only web-grounded surfaces produce them: Perplexity, ChatGPT with search, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot. A cited page is not necessarily a named brand; an assistant can cite a review site while naming the brands that site reviews, and it can name a brand from memory without citing anything. Citations show which pages the engine trusts; mentions show which brands it recommends.
A model API called without web search produces mentions only. A consumer app with search turned on produces mentions plus citations, and its mentions can differ from the API's because the retrieved pages change what the model says. Any measurement has to say which surface it used, or the numbers cannot be compared.
The audit measures mentions on model APIs without web search, and says so. That isolates what the models themselves say about a category when no page is put in front of them, which is the baseline a brand's own publishing is trying to move. It does not measure citations in the default basket; the methodology page lists which providers are web-grounded and when they are included.
For being bought, mentions: the buyer acts on the brands named. For being trusted as a source, citations: they show which pages the engine reads. A brand usually wants both, and they are earned by different pages.
No. An engine can cite a brand's page as a source for a fact and recommend a different brand in the same answer. Read the answer text for the recommendation and the links for the sources.
Not in the default audit, which calls model APIs without web search. The methodology page says which providers are web-grounded and under what conditions they are part of a measurement.
Other definitions
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