> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.attensira.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Citations and sources

> The difference between a mention, a citation and a source, plus how source share and average citation position are calculated.

A **mention** is your name in the answer text with no link attached. A **citation** is one URL the model attached. A **source** is a domain bucket across many citations. Three different objects, three different counts — and confusing them is the single most common misreading of AI visibility data.

## Mention, citation, source: what is the difference?

| Term     | What it is                                            | Counted as                 | Answers                        |
| -------- | ----------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------- | ------------------------------ |
| Mention  | Your brand named in the answer text, no link required | One per run                | Does the model talk about you? |
| Citation | One URL the model attached to an answer               | One per URL                | Which pages did it link?       |
| Source   | A domain bucket aggregating many citations            | One per domain, per window | Which sites feed the answers?  |

<Note>
  In the engine's words: **"Mentioned is not cited: a model can name a brand it never links."** The reverse also happens — a model can cite a page on your domain in an answer that never names you, because the page was useful evidence for something else.
</Note>

The nesting is straightforward. Many citations roll up into one source. Many runs roll up into one [mention rate](/measure/mention-rate) or [citation rate](/measure/citation-rate). Rates count runs; sources count URLs. Never compare a rate to a source share and expect them to reconcile — they have different denominators and different units.

## What is source share?

Source share is a domain's slice of all citations in the window: citations to that domain, divided by every citation Attensira recorded across all your tracked runs in that window. Unlike mention and citation rates, source shares **do** describe parts of a whole, because each citation belongs to exactly one domain.

```text theme={null}
source share = citations to a domain
             ÷ all citations in the window
```

That makes source share a map of the citation landscape around your prompts: which publications, review sites, forums, documentation hubs and competitors the models actually draw on. Your own domain appears in this list like any other. A high source share for a review site means models lean on it when answering your prompts — which tells you where being present is worth the effort.

Source share is sensitive to which prompts and which models you track, since those choose the runs the citations came from. Widen your prompt set and the source mix will shift.

## What does average citation position mean?

Average citation position is the mean index of a URL within the model's citation list, calculated **per source domain**. If a domain's URLs tend to appear as the model's first attached link, its average position sits near the top of the list; if they show up after several others, it sits lower.

<Warning>
  Average position is an index into the citation list. It is **not** a rank of your brand, not a search ranking, and not a competitive leaderboard position. Attensira does not compute a brand position or rank metric — no such number exists in the product, and a number that looks like one is this domain-level index.
</Warning>

Read it as a weak ordering signal and nothing stronger. Models order citations for reasons that are not documented and not stable, and an answer with two citations produces very different index arithmetic than an answer with twelve. Position moves are worth noticing only alongside a change in source share or citation rate; on its own, a shift from 2.4 to 2.1 is not evidence of anything.

Like every other number in the product, source and position figures carry sample information. See [Reading the numbers](/measure/reading-the-numbers) for how to handle small samples and unmeasured cells.