Visibility vs. citations: they measure different things

This is the single most common source of confusion in the dashboard, and it has real consequences if you miss it, so it's worth explaining carefully.

Two different questions

Visibility answers: did the AI say your brand's name in its answer? If an AI response lists "Asana, Monday, and ClickUp" as good project management tools and your brand isn't one of the three named, your visibility for that response is 0%, full stop, regardless of anything else that happened behind the scenes of that answer.

Citations answer a different question entirely: did the AI use your website as a source while building its answer? AI models often pull facts, quotes, or context from specific web pages while writing a response, and they don't always name every brand behind every source out loud. Your site can be cited, actively feeding the AI's answer, in a response where your brand is never mentioned by name.

Where to look for each

• Visibility is what you see in the overview score, the prompt performance table, and the per-model breakdown. It only reflects whether your brand name showed up in the AI's text.
• Citations live under the Sources tab, both at the account level (which domains and URLs get cited overall) and in the per-prompt detail view (which sources fed that specific response).
• Recent Chats, filtered to Brand Mentioned, shows you the exact AI conversations where your brand was named, so you can read the real text instead of just the score.

If a prompt shows a low visibility number, check that same prompt's detail view and the Sources tab. It may well be pulling directly from your site while never saying your name.

Why both numbers matter

Visibility tells you whether AI assistants are actively recommending your brand by name, which is the closest thing to a direct product endorsement in an AI answer. Citations tell you whether your content is trusted enough to be used as a source at all, which is often the step that comes before your brand starts getting named directly. A prompt with strong citations but weak visibility is often a sign you're on the right track content-wise, and the fix is to make your brand name more prominent and explicit in the content being cited, not to assume the tracking is broken.

Treat visibility as "am I being recommended" and citations as "is my content being used." Improving one often helps the other over time, but they can move independently, and a dashboard that only showed one of them would be hiding half the picture.