Citation Share

Citation Share is the percentage of total AI-generated citations in your category that belong to your brand. If AI engines produce 200 brand citations across all relevant queries in your market and 40 reference your brand, your Citation Share is 20%. It is the AI-era equivalent of market share — measured not in revenue but in machine trust.

Why Citation Share Matters

Share of Voice tells you how often your brand appears. Citation Share tells you how much of the category's AI attention you own relative to every competitor. The distinction matters because AI citation distribution follows a power law: research shows 34% of AI citations in a given category often concentrate on a single brand. The top 3 brands typically capture 60-70% of total citation share, leaving the remaining dozen competitors to split the rest.

This means Citation Share is a zero-sum game. Every citation your competitor earns is one your brand did not. And unlike traditional market share, citation share can shift rapidly — a single authoritative media placement can redistribute 5-10% of category citations within weeks.

How to Measure Citation Share

1. Define the complete set of category queries (50-100 for accurate measurement)
2. Run all queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews
3. Count total brand citations across all responses (your brand + all competitors)
4. Calculate: Your Citations / Total Category Citations = Citation Share

Measure monthly and track movement. A 2-3% monthly gain in Citation Share indicates strong Citation Velocity.

How to Grow Citation Share

Citation Share grows through displacement — your brand must earn citations that currently go to competitors:

• Close citation gaps — Use Citation Gap Analysis to identify the specific queries where competitors are cited and you are not
• Earned media in AI-trusted publications — 82-89% of AI citations originate from third-party sources, making Tier-1 placements the primary lever
• Category ownership content — Original research, frameworks, and data that AI engines treat as authoritative category references

Citation Share is the definitive competitive metric in Machine Relations. Pair it with AI Visibility Score for your absolute performance and Recommendation Rate for the quality of your citations.