How Citedly Scores
Your Brand
A transparent look at what we measure, how we calculate your score, and where the numbers should (and shouldn't) be taken as gospel.
What a Citation Means
When AI mentions your brand
In Citedly's system, a citation happens whenever an AI engine — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, or similar — names your brand in response to a relevant question.
Think of it as the AI equivalent of a Google ranking. If someone asks “What's the best CRM for a small sales team?” and the AI replies with a list that includes HubSpot, HubSpot gets a citation for that query. If your brand isn't in that list, it doesn't.
Citations are binary per query: either the AI mentioned your brand in its response, or it didn't. We don't currently weight for position (first vs. fifth mention) or sentiment — just presence.
Query Sets
How we test brand visibility
A query setis the list of prompts we send to each AI engine on your behalf. These are real, representative questions that your potential customers are already asking AI tools — things like “best project management software for remote teams” or “what CRM integrates with Slack.”
Our free audit uses a default set of 5 generic B2B queries to give you a quick baseline. Paid plans let you define a custom query set of 10–50 prompts tailored to your category, use case, or buyer persona.
Why query sets matter:a brand might be well-known in one niche and invisible in another. Running prompts that mirror your real buyer's questions gives you a score that reflects actual market visibility — not abstract AI knowledge.
Score Calculation
The math behind the number
The citation score is a straightforward percentage:
e.g. 3 citations out of 5 queries = Score 60
Each AI engine gets its own score. When you're on a paid plan with multiple engines, Citedly shows you a per-engine breakdown alongside an overall blended score — so you can see whether, say, Perplexity cites you more than ChatGPT does.
Scores run from 0 (never cited) to 100 (cited in every query). Most brands we audit land between 5–30 on their first run. A score above 50 is strong.
Limitations
What the score can't tell you
AI language models are not search engines with stable, deterministic indexes. There are a few hard limits to understand:
The same model can give different answers to the same question across runs. Sampling temperature, model updates, and context windows all introduce variance. A score of 40 on Monday might legitimately be 45 on Wednesday — without any change on your end.
Small changes in phrasing can produce very different results. "Best CRM software" and "top CRM tools for startups" may cite completely different brands even though they mean roughly the same thing. This is why we encourage broad, representative query sets rather than a single cherry-picked prompt.
AI models are probabilistic by design. Even with the same prompt and the same model, you may not get the same list of brands twice in a row. Citedly averages results where possible to smooth this out, but a single-query audit should be treated as a snapshot, not a constant.
We test the engines listed in your plan. A brand might be highly visible on Perplexity but not on ChatGPT, or vice versa. Check per-engine scores rather than leaning entirely on the blended average.
How to Use Your Score
A compass, not a ruler
Citedly scores are most valuable as directional signals, not precise measurements. Here's the mindset that gets the most out of them:
Track your score over time, not as a single data point. A consistent upward trend after publishing new content is meaningful. A one-point shift between two audits is noise.
Use competitor scores as relative benchmarks. If a competitor consistently scores 20 points higher, that gap is real — even if both scores fluctuate by a few points run-to-run.
Focus on the query-level breakdown. Knowing you were cited in 3 out of 5 queries is less useful than knowing exactly which 2 queries you missed — because those are the content opportunities.
Don't optimize for a specific score number. Optimize for appearing in more of the right queries for your category. The score will follow.
The bottom line
AI citation data is new territory. No tool — including Citedly — can give you a perfect, stable readout of how AI talks about your brand across all contexts. What we can give you is a consistent methodology, honest comparisons, and the clearest directional signal available today. Use it to move forward, not to file a precise report.
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