AI Search Citation Tool
Run a citation check across four AI engines
Give it a domain and a category. It returns every source behind the answers in your market, which of them are yours, and which are winning instead.
No site access, no verification, no install.
What is an AI search citation tool?
An AI search citation tool queries AI answer engines with the questions your buyers ask, captures the sources each answer was built from, and reports how often your domain is among them. The output is a source list rather than a score: which URLs get attributed, on which questions, in which engines, and which competing domains appear in your place.
It needs nothing from your site. Because it observes public engine behaviour from the outside, there is no tag to install, no analytics to connect and no domain to verify — which also means you can point it at any domain, including a competitor's.
This page covers what one run returns and how to read it. For what a citation is and why it differs from a mention, start at the AI citation tracker overview.
What one run covers
Sample size is what separates a citation rate you can act on from a number you cannot.
How to read a citation report
In this order. The headline number is the least useful part.
Start with the competing source list, not your score
Sort the cited domains by how often they appear across the whole prompt set. The handful at the top are the sources effectively deciding who gets recommended in your category. This is the most valuable output of the entire run and the one people skip past.
Then look at which of your URLs earned anything
Citations concentrate on a few pages, and they are rarely the pages you expected. Whatever format those pages share — a specific comparison, a plainly-answered question, a data-led post — is a template worth repeating.
Split the misses into "no source" and "someone else's source"
Prompts where no citation appeared at all are usually parametric answers, where the lever is reputation rather than content. Prompts where a rival domain was cited are retrieval losses, and those you can contest directly. Treating both as the same problem wastes most of the effort.
Read the raw answers on your near-misses
Prompts where you appear intermittently are the cheapest wins, and the answer text usually says why you lost — a missing specific, an out-of-date figure, a constraint you never addressed. That sentence is worth more than the aggregate.
Only then look at the rate
The percentage is for reporting and for comparing against a later run. It is not a diagnosis, and on its own it tells you nothing about what to change.
Free check or full analysis?
The free tier answers one question well. The paid ones answer the follow-up.
| Free check | Full analysis | |
|---|---|---|
| Prompts | 60 | 400 |
| Engines | 1 | 4 |
| Answers your question | Am I being cited at all? | Who is cited instead, on which questions, and what do I change? |
| Source attribution | Visible in the raw answers | Aggregated into a ranked kingmaker source list |
| Competitor source mapping | — | From the Fix tier |
| Fix plan | — | From the Fix tier, with SMART targets |
| Price | $0 | From $59 per analysis |
No subscription in either column — analyses are priced per run. Full tier comparison →
Citation tool FAQs
What does an AI search citation tool return?
A source list rather than a single score. For every prompt it records which domains the answer was built from, which brands were named, and whether your domain was among the sources. Aggregated across the run that becomes your citation rate per engine, the list of your URLs that earned attributions, and a ranked list of the competing domains cited in your place.
Do I need to verify my domain to check citations?
No. The measurement observes public AI engine answers from the outside, so there is no ownership check, no tag to install and no analytics connection. You provide a domain and the category you compete in, and the tool supplies the prompts.
Can I check citations for a competitor's domain?
Yes. Since nothing about the measurement depends on access to the site, a competitor's citation profile is exactly as measurable as your own. It is a common way to work out why a particular rival keeps surfacing in AI recommendations, and agencies often run one on a prospect before a pitch.
How many prompts does a citation check need to be reliable?
For a yes-or-no read on whether you are cited at all, a few dozen is enough — which is what the free tier is for. For a citation rate you intend to compare against a later run, you want several hundred, because answers vary between identical runs and small samples swing on that variance alone. Full analyses run 400 prompts for this reason.
Is there a free way to check AI citations?
Yes, two. BlueJar's free tier runs 60 prompts against one engine with no credit card, and you can read the sources in every raw answer it captures. You can also do it by hand: ask Perplexity the ten questions your buyers ask and note which domains it cites, since Perplexity shows sources openly. The manual route is genuinely useful for a first look and does not scale to a rate you can track.
Related reading
Find out which domains own your category
Sixty prompts, one engine, free — with every cited source readable.