The pages an answer was built from, engine by engine.
Sources & Citations is Koalr's record of the pages each AI engine drew on to write its answer to one of your prompts — kept per answer and per engine, split into the pages you own and the pages you do not, and typed by what kind of site each is. Being named and being read are separate outcomes, recorded separately. Across 267,963 citations in Koalr's off-page research, 84% pointed at pages the mentioned brand did not own.
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Sources recorded per answer, per engine, on every plan.
The AI answer engines Koalr monitors for your brand
The mechanism
Being named and being read are not the same event.
They come out of the same answer and are recorded in two separate steps from different parts of it, which is why the two counts never reconcile and are not supposed to.
Two records from one answer
One step reads the prose and records which brands were named. The other reads the list of pages the engine returned, resolves each to a domain, decides whether it is yours, and stores it against that answer. Because they draw on different parts of the answer, the record can show an answer that named you without reading you, and an answer that read you without naming you.
The four states, and which one to worry about
Named and cited is the outcome you want. Neither is the honest starting position. Named but not cited means the engine knows of you from somewhere else — worth finding out where. Cited but not named is the one people miss: your page did the work and the answer described the thing without saying who provides it. That last state usually points at a page that explains a topic well and never establishes whose page it is.
A citation without a name carries no tone
When an engine cites you without writing your name, there is no sentence about you to read, so the answer contributes nothing to your sentiment rather than a neutral middle. An answer that never described you should not be able to pull the measure of how you are described.
What to do about it
Every cited page is one of two jobs.
A list of the pages beating you is not useful until it is sorted by what you can do about them, because the two answers go to different people. Koalr makes that split on every cited page, so the same URL never gets one recommendation on one screen and the opposite on another.
Pages you can get onto
Directories, marketplaces, review platforms, comparison sites, forums and social threads, industry bodies, government and academic sites, reference works like Wikipedia.
Somebody else controls the entry, which means the move is to be listed, corrected or updated rather than to publish anything. These are usually the fastest wins on the list, because the page is already being cited — it simply has the wrong information about you, or none.
Pages you have to out-write
Editorial articles, a competitor's own pages, anything published by someone with no reason to add you.
There is no listing to join. The only way to take the slot is to publish something an engine prefers for that question. Slower, and the compounding kind: a page that earns citations keeps earning them.
Alongside the split, each cited page is typed by what kind of site it is — a company's own site, editorial, a community or forum, a review platform, a reference or directory, an institution, a social platform. The type is what turns a list of domains into a pattern: a category whose answers come mostly out of forums is a different problem from one whose answers come out of trade press, and they are not fixed the same way.
Worked example
One answer, four sources, two jobs.
An engine answers "best CRM for a small B2B team" and returns four pages behind its reply: an independent round-up post, a software directory's category page, a competitor's comparison page, and a forum thread from two years ago.
- Each URL is resolved and attributed. Fragments are stripped, the domain is worked out from the URL itself rather than from whatever label the engine attached, and each one is checked against your own domains. None of these four are yours.
- Each is typed. Editorial, directory, a competitor's own site, community. Four different kinds of page, which already tells you this category's answers are not being built out of vendor sites.
- The split is applied. The directory and the forum are pages you can get onto — a listing to claim, a thread you can answer. The round-up and the competitor page have to be out-written.
- It becomes a queue, not a report. Two of the four are outreach this week. One is a brief. One is a competitor page you now know is doing the work, which is exactly the input the Content Studio drafts against.
- And it repeats per engine. Ask the same question on another engine and the four pages are often not the same four. That is the argument for reading sources per engine rather than as one merged list — the work differs by where you are losing.
Reading it correctly
What a citation count does not mean.
It counts citation events, not pages
The same URL cited by two engines is two records, and cited again in next week's run is another. That is the right shape for spotting a page the engines keep returning to, and the wrong number to read as “how many pages cite me”. For that, look at distinct domains.
Only the first several sources per answer are kept
Some engines return dozens of URLs behind a single reply. Koalr keeps a bounded set per answer, preferring one from each distinct domain before a second from any, so the record is biased towards the breadth of sources rather than the depth of any one. Treat it as a floor on volume and a fair read on variety.
A cited page is not necessarily a persuasive one
Engines differ in what they expose. Some return only the pages that shaped the reply; others return everything they looked at. Where an engine does not separate the two, neither can Koalr, so a source list can include a page the answer glanced at and did not use.
Being cited is not being recommended
Your page can be the source for an answer whose recommendation is somebody else. Citations tell you the engine trusts the page; the mention record — your AI Visibility Score, shown in-app as Prompt Visibility Rate — and the leaderboard tell you who it named.
It is not a link count
Nothing here is a backlink metric and it should not be read next to one. A page can be cited constantly by AI engines with barely any links pointing at it, and the reverse is just as common.
Which plans include it
Sources and citations are on every plan, including Starter, and recorded on all seven engines. What changes is how many questions you are collecting them from: 25 tracked prompts per site on Starter, 40 per site on Growth and 50 per site on Business. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Where to go next
Sources and citations, answered.
Still wondering? Run your free scan.
A mention means an AI engine named your brand in its answer. A citation means the engine drew on one of your pages to write that answer. They are separate outcomes recorded separately, and you can have either without the other. Across 267,963 citations in Koalr's off-page research, 84% pointed at pages the brand did not own — so being talked about and being read are routinely two different things.
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