How do I identify the types of pages AI is most likely to cite in my category?
- Also asked as:
- How do I see which sources AI platforms cite most often?
- How do I find competitor pages that AI platforms prefer?
Scrunch recommends tracking citation consistency—the percentage of AI responses that have cited a source—to identify the types of pages AI is most likely to cite in a category.
Additional context: Citation consistency is calculated by dividing the number of responses that have cited a source by the total number of responses.
Example
For example, imagine a Scrunch user at a project management software company wants to understand which pages AI platforms cite most often for prompts like, "What's the best project management tool for remote teams?"
Step 1: Check citation consistency
The user opens the Citations tab in Scrunch to view citation consistency for URLs across their tracked topics.
Step 2: Review high-performing sources
The user reviews sources with high citation consistency to understand why the content performs well. For example, a competitor's page cited in 70% of responses might feature structured comparison tables, clear use-case headers, and detailed pricing information that AI platforms find easy to reference.
Step 3: Prioritize using Influence Score
Scrunch's Influence Score helps the user identify which cited sources are most impactful for business-relevant prompts. Influence Score is calculated by multiplying the percentage of responses that have cited a source by the unique number of prompts.
Follow-up question: What criteria matter most when deciding whether to replace an existing cited source?
Scrunch recommends weighing impact versus effort when deciding whether to replace an existing cited source. Determine whether replacing the cited source is worth the time and resources for that specific prompt.
If it is, start with “easy-to-beat” sources, like pages that are light on substance or that have obvious discrepancies between the content of the page and its title and description.
Related FAQs
What benchmarks or baselines are useful when evaluating AI search performance?
Scrunch recommends tracking brand presence, citations, referral traffic, AI agent traffic, and share of voice versus competitors as key performance indicators.
How can I see if my visibility in AI search is improving or declining over time?
Scrunch recommends monitoring AI search trend data like brand mentions and citations consistently over 2-3 week periods to identify real trends versus one-off changes.
How many prompts should I track for AI search?
Scrunch recommends estimating how many prompts to track for AI search using the following approach: X [# of topic clusters] x Y [12-15 questions related to each topic cluster] = Z [# of AI search prompts to track]. The primary goal is to get a representative sampling of data across all customer journey stages via a mix of branded and non-branded prompts.