---
name: ai-citation-monitoring
description: Use to find out whether assistants actually cite you, since this traffic is largely invisible in analytics and referrers.
---

# AI citation monitoring

Assistant-driven discovery mostly does not appear as a referrer. Someone asks a model, gets your name, and arrives by typing it - showing up as direct or branded search. Without deliberate checking you cannot tell whether GEO work did anything.

## What you need first

- The 15-25 questions your buyers actually ask
- Access to the assistants your market uses

## Method

1. Write the questions as a buyer would type them, not as keywords. "Is there an AI tool that writes and publishes SEO articles" rather than "ai seo tool".
2. Ask each question in each assistant on a fixed cadence, in a clean session with no history.
3. Record three things per run: whether you were named, which competitors were named, and which URL was cited if any.
4. Track the citation source. Being quoted from a third-party listicle is a different result from being quoted from your own page, and demands a different response.
5. Watch branded search and direct traffic for correlated movement. That is the closest measurable proxy for assistant-driven demand.
6. When a competitor is named and you are not, fetch the cited page and compare structure rather than word count - it is usually more extractable, not longer.

## What this produces

A tracked table of question, assistant, named-or-not, competitors named and cited URL, run on a fixed cadence so change is visible.

## Where this goes wrong

- Running queries in a session that already carries history, which biases the answer toward your brand
- Treating a single run as a result - answers vary between runs and models
- Expecting a referrer that will usually never exist

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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/ai-citation-monitoring