Cited URL Rate — definition
Cited URL Rate is the proportion of indexed web pages on a domain that have successfully earned at least one citation inside a generative AI answer.
Expanded Explanation
Measures how deeply an AI answer engine trusts a domain's overall content library, rather than just its homepage or top hero article.
Analogy & Mental Model
Cited URL Rate is like checking what percentage of books in a library are actively checked out and cited by scholars.
Why It Matters & Where It's Used
A high Cited URL Rate indicates that an entire content library is formatted for RAG extraction and answer engine discovery.
Concrete Real-World Application
An enterprise blog increasing its Cited URL Rate from 12% to 64% after converting all blog headers into BLUF format.
Cited URL Rate vs Indexed Pages Ratio
Indexed pages ratio measures how many pages Google stores, whereas Cited URL Rate measures how many pages AI models actively quote.
How It Works & Key Components
Audited by cross-referencing site sitemaps against AI citation logs.
1Sitemap URL Extraction
Listing all published URLs from XML sitemaps.
2Prompt Probe Cross-Matching
Checking AI answer citations against the sitemap URL list.
3Ratio Calculation
Dividing cited URLs by total published URLs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:How do you fix uncited pages?
Fix uncited pages by adding BLUF summary boxes, adding schema markup, including proprietary statistics, and allowing AI crawler bots in robots.txt.
Get cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity & Gemini with citedby
Optimize your brand’s AI visibility score, track Share of Model across buyer prompts, and turn zero-click search into your highest-converting pipeline source.
Explore citedby Platform