# How can you tell which pages an AI engine cited?

An AI engine's citations come from the answer itself: most engines return the URLs their answer was grounded in, and those URLs are the only honest evidence of what a page contributed. Read the citation list per question, keep the count of engines that agree on each domain, and compare that list with the previous check. A domain cited by one engine in one run is a mention; a domain several engines name is a finding.

## Key points

- Read citations from the answer, never from the prose. A model that names a source in a sentence may have produced it from memory, which is not a citation anyone can inspect.
- Count agreement. Measured on real corpora, a single engine's citation list reproduces only about 58–62% of itself minutes later, while domains several engines agree on reproduce far more reliably — so the engine count is part of the reading, not decoration.
- Filter retrieval backends (search and extraction providers that appear in citation lists in some pipelines) and say how many were filtered — a silent filter is indistinguishable from a number that was changed.
- Diff the common-citation set rather than the whole set. Raw movement is dominated by single-engine mentions, so it churns between checks and hides the direction; the movement of multi-engine agreement is the signal.
- Know which pages are yours: attribution is only computable against a registered set of your own addresses.

## Frequently asked questions

**Q: Why not trust a citation count from a single run?**
A: Because it does not reproduce. The same engines asked the same question minutes later return a partly different citation list, so a single-run count mostly measures the run. Repeating the check, and reporting how many engines agree, is what makes the number usable.

**Q: What does it mean when a competitor's page is cited and mine is not?**
A: That the engine found something on their page it could lift and attribute. The useful next step is not to copy the page but to check whether your equivalent page is collectable at all — allowed by robots.txt, returning readable text, and structured so the answer is in the first paragraph.

## Sources

- https://autoaeo.work/aeo/answers/share-of-answer.md
- https://autoaeo.work/aeo/answers/citation-stability.md
- https://autoaeo.work/aeo/product.md

Updated 2026-10-07. Canonical source: https://autoaeo.work/aeo/answers/which-pages-ai-engines-cite.md