Maya/Help Center

Understanding citations

See which sources AI assistants cite for your topics — and how to become one of them.

Updated 2026-10-12

When an AI assistant answers with web sources, it cites them. Citations are the supply chain of AI answers: the assistants decide what to say partly from what those pages say. The Citations page shows every source cited across your tracked prompts.

Why citations matter more than you think

If your brand is missing from answers, the fastest diagnosis is to look at what is being cited. Three situations, three different fixes:

  1. Your pages are cited, but your brand isn't mentioned. Your content is useful but your brand presence in it is weak — strengthen brand context on those pages.
  2. Third-party pages that mention you are cited. Reviews, listicles, comparison sites carry your visibility. Nurture those relationships and make sure your data on those pages is current.
  3. Neither you nor pages mentioning you are cited. You need content targeting those questions, or coverage on sources the assistants already trust.

What the page shows

  • Cited sources ranked by how often they appear, with the prompts and providers they appeared for.
  • Your pages — citations of your own domains are highlighted, so you can track "owned" citation share over time.
  • Social share — citations of social platforms (YouTube, Reddit, X, Instagram, LinkedIn) broken out separately, since winning there works differently from winning with articles.
  • Per-citation detail — open a source to see the exact answers that cited it.

How to become a cited source

There is no trick; assistants cite pages that are crawlable, specific, and trusted. In practice:

  • Answer the question directly on the page. Pages structured as a clear answer to a specific question are cited far more than generic category pages.
  • Keep AI crawlers in. If your robots.txt or bot protection blocks GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and friends, you are invisible at the retrieval stage. The Technical section of Maya audits this.
  • Be present on already-trusted sources. If the same comparison site is cited for every prompt in your category, being listed there accurately is often faster than outranking it.
  • Freshness counts. Stale data (old pricing, old product names) gets you dropped or, worse, cited incorrectly.

Maya Forge can generate draft content for the prompt topics where you lack citable pages — see Creating content with Maya Forge.