AI search citations are the third-party and owned URLs that AI engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini reference when they generate an answer. Tracking which URLs get cited in your space – and whether your brand is mentioned on them – is the fastest way to understand what actually influences AI answers about your category.
Today we shipped a major update to the OtterlyAI Citations Report that makes that tracking dramatically faster: a new Winners & Losers overview, bookmarkable URLs, and a completely new Citation Details View. Here’s what changed, why it matters for your generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy, and how to use it.
Why the Citations Report matters
The Citations Report inside your OtterlyAI brand report is one of the most powerful ways to understand the sources shaping AI answers in your category. You can filter cited URLs by domain, break them down by domain category, and – critically – see whether your brand is actually mentioned on each one.
It’s the report I hear marketers rely on most, because it answers four questions that directly drive GEO strategy:
Which URLs are getting cited most often in your space?
Are your URLs getting cited — and if so, how often, and how do they compare to competitor URLs?
Which social posts and media articles are being referenced by AI engines?
Is your brand mentioned on those citations? OtterlyAI checks every single cited URL to show whether you – or your competitors – earn a mention.
That last point is the difference between “a URL was cited” and “a URL was cited and it talks about you” — which is where off-page GEO opportunities hide.
With this update, the Citations Report gets three major new capabilities.
1. Winners & Losers: track your biggest citation movements
The new Winners & Losers overview gives you an instant read on the biggest citation movements in your space. It answers two questions at a glance:
Winners: Which URLs gained the most citations in your selected time window, compared to the previous window of equal length?
Losers: Which URLs lost citations over the same period?
This is the fastest way to spot momentum shifts — a competitor’s comparison page suddenly getting cited more, a Reddit thread gaining traction, or one of your own pages slipping. For anyone building recurring brand reports, it turns citation tracking from a manual diffing exercise into a single view.
2. Bookmark URLs: Star the citations that matter to you
The Citations Report is great for discovery, but the one thing I personally missed was a way to bookmark. I wanted to keep an eye on the URLs I’m actively working on, the competitor URLs I want to keep tracking, and the off-page citations I’m trying to earn.
So we added it: you can now Star (or un-Star) any URL.
Starred URLs give you a focused watchlist of the citations that actually matter to your strategy – your priority pages, key competitor sources, and the third-party URLs you’re targeting for digital PR – all in one place instead of scattered across the full report.
3. Citation Details View: dive deep into any URL’s performance
We also launched a completely new Citation Details View – the update I’m most excited about. It turns a single cited URL into a full story of why and where it’s winning.
Click any citation row in the Citations table (including within Winners & Losers) and a new Citation Details Drawer opens, showing you:
Citations over time – is this URL climbing or slipping in citations? You can now see the trend clearly instead of guessing.
The prompts this URL was cited in – and which AI engine (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot) each citation appeared on.
A new “brand coverage” column – showing whether your brand is mentioned in each of those prompts’ answers.
Key citation metrics for that specific URL, in context.
Click a prompt row inside that drawer and the Prompt Details Drawer opens right on top of it — a clean “drawer-over-drawer” view that lets you drill from a URL, to the prompts it was cited in, to the full AI answer, without ever losing your place.
The result: you get context on any single URL’s AI-search performance that simply wasn’t available before.
How to use these updates in your GEO strategy
Here’s a simple workflow to turn the new Citations Report into action:
Step 1: Scan Winners & Losers weekly. Start each reporting cycle here to catch the biggest citation shifts in your space before your competitors do.
Step 2: Star your priority and competitor URLs. Build a watchlist of the pages you’re optimizing and the third-party sources you want to earn citations from.
Step 3: Open the Citation Details View on your winners. See which prompts and engines are driving citations, then create or optimize content that targets those same prompts.
Step 4: Chase brand coverage, not just citations. Use the brand-coverage column to find high-citation URLs where you aren’t yet mentioned — those are your clearest off-page GEO opportunities (guest content, digital PR, community participation).
Common pitfall: Focusing only on your own pages. Remember that 95% of AI citations come from third-party URLs — the biggest wins usually come from being mentioned on sources you don’t own.
Try the new Citations Report yourself
Citation tracking is the foundation of any serious generative engine optimization strategy – you can’t optimize what you can’t see. These updates make it faster to see which URLs shape AI answers in your space, track how they move, and find the off-page opportunities that get your brand mentioned.
Head over to your Brand Reports to explore the new Citations Report, or start a free trial to see your own AI search citations today.
