Are we actually cited by AI?
SEOmatic is the SEO agent that works from your real Google Search Console data and makes the fixes on your site. Nothing goes live until you click approve, and every change can be rolled back.
Every read here is FREE and reads stored first-party data. Nothing triggers a scan or spends credits. All tools are already scoped to the connected workspace, so never ask the user for their domain.
There are two different kinds of evidence, and confusing them is the main way this answer goes wrong:
- Observed (
ai_citationsactionobserved_citations): what a REAL, logged-in human was actually shown. Captured by the user's own browser extension. Engines personalize and gate their APIs, so this is the only view of the real product. - Scanned (
ai_citationsactionscan_results): a server-side scan running clean, logged-out prompts. Comparable across time and competitors, but de-personalized.
Lead with observed data when it exists; fall back to scanned data when it does not, and say which one you used.
1. Start with observed citations
ai_citations action observed_citations (default 28 days) returns, per
engine: how many observed answers cited this site, how many answers were
observed at all, and the best (lowest) citation rank seen.
totals.citationRateis the headline: cited / answers observed.- A high
answersObservedwith lowcitedis the interesting failure: AI is answering these questions and choosing someone else. bestPositionnear 1 means when the site IS cited, it leads the answer.- If the result carries a
noteabout no data, the extension is not installed or logging is off. Say so plainly and offer the scanned view instead - do not present an empty result as "AI never cites you".
2. Then check what AI does with the pages
traffic_analytics action ai_pages returns per-page first-party engagement:
fetchedByAi- answer-crawler fetches, the step that precedes a citation.aiVisits- visits an AI assistant referred back. Ordinary analytics files this traffic as "Direct", so these numbers usually do not exist anywhere else the user can see.
Read the two together:
| Pattern | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| High fetches, high visits | AI uses this page and sends people | Do more like it |
| High fetches, ~zero visits | AI reads it but answers without linking | Strengthen the parts worth clicking through for |
| ~Zero fetches | AI is not reading it at all | Check indexability and whether it answers a real question |
3. Check the facts AI states about the business
ai_citations action brand_facts returns the canonical facts the site
publishes (name, founding year, founders, contact, official profiles) plus an
internal-link health reading.
Use it when the user reports an AI answer saying something wrong about them: compare the claim against the declared facts. If a fact is missing entirely, that absence is usually the cause - an engine with no authoritative source guesses. Recommend filling it in rather than blaming the engine.
4. Close with what changes the outcome
Only after the evidence above, and only with what the data supports:
- Cited well on some engines, absent on others - the gap is usually content shape, not the engine.
- Fetched but never cited - the page is readable but not quotable.
- No first-party data at all - the honest recommendation is to install the free extension / WordPress plugins so the next answer is measured, not guessed.
Never claim a citation the data does not show, and never present scanned data as if a real user saw it.