Sources
See which websites AI cites when answering your customers. Find the sources that mention your competitors and how your own content is cited.
Updated
When ChatGPT and other AI platforms answer questions, they often reference websites, articles, and other sources.
Klarvu shows you which sources appear, how frequently they're cited, and whether they mention your business or your competitors. This helps you understand which websites are visible in your market and where it might be worth looking more closely.
What is a source?
A source, also called a citation, is a website or individual page that an AI answer references or links to.
One citation means one reference in one AI answer. If the same page is cited in multiple answers, each reference counts.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can all provide source citations. During the free trial, you'll see sources from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
Sources are worth paying attention to because AI often draws information from the pages it cites. If a comparison article appears repeatedly in AI answers but only mentions your competitors, that's a useful place to investigate.
How Klarvu analyzes sources
When Klarvu finds a source in an AI answer, it attempts to retrieve the page and analyze its content. Each cited page is fetched once for analysis.
We look at several things:
- "Brand mentioned" / "Mention you": Whether the page mentions your brand.
- "Competitors named": Which of your tracked competitors appear on the page.
- "Category" / "Domain category": What type of website or source it is.
Klarvu groups sources into the following categories:
| Category | What it means |
|---|---|
| "Brand" | Your own website. |
| "Competitor" | A competitor's website. |
| "Review Platform" | A website featuring reviews. |
| "News & Media" | News outlets and other editorial publications. |
| "Forum/Community" | Discussion forums and online communities. |
| "Social Media" | Social media platforms. |
| "Reference" | Reference websites and informational resources. |
| "Other" | Sources that don't fit the other categories. |
"All sources" – your complete source overview
"All sources" brings together the websites cited across your collected AI answers.
At the top, you'll find three key metrics:
- "Citations · last 30 days": The total number of citations recorded over the past 30 days.
- "Cited domains": How many different domains have been cited. The label "Top 10 hold X% of citations" shows what share of all citations comes from the ten most-cited domains.
- "Analysed pages that mention you": The number of analyzed source pages that mention your brand.
If the ten most-cited domains account for a large share of all citations, it tells you that a relatively small group of websites appears frequently in AI answers.
Follow citation trends
The "Citations per day" chart shows how many citations were recorded each day.
Under "Trending this week", you can see which domains gained the most new citations compared with the previous week.
This can be interesting when a particular review platform or industry publication suddenly starts appearing more frequently.
Explore websites and individual pages
The source table has two views:
- "By domain": Groups sources by website. You can see the number of citations, how many individual pages were cited, whether the domain mentions your brand ("Mention you"), and its category.
- "By source": Shows individual pages and URLs referenced by AI.
You can search the table and click a domain to see its cited pages.
Clicking an individual source opens a detailed view with:
- The number of times the source has been cited.
- "Brand citation %": The percentage of answers citing that source that also mention your brand.
- Which competitors the page mentions.
- Which prompts the source appears in.
This helps you understand whether a source appears mainly for particular questions and which companies its content discusses.
"Sources that favour competitors" – where competitors appear without you
Not every source is equally relevant to your business.
"Sources that favour competitors" highlights pages cited by AI that either belong to a competitor or mention a competitor without mentioning your brand.
Imagine a large software review website frequently appears in answers about your industry.
It discusses three of your competitors but doesn't mention your company.
That doesn't necessarily mean the page caused those competitors to be recommended. But it gives you something concrete to investigate.
"Your pages" – how AI uses your website
"Your pages" focuses exclusively on content from your own website.
This includes subdomains and additional websites you've added to your brand.
Here, you can explore which of your pages AI actually cites and which pages haven't appeared as sources.
At the top, you'll see three metrics:
- "Pages cited by AI": The number of unique pages from your website that AI has cited.
- "Answers citing your site": How many AI answers contain a citation to your website.
- "Pages cited per engine": How many of your pages have been cited by each AI platform.
The table shows the following information for each page:
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| "Answers" | How many AI answers cite the page. |
| "Prompts" | Which questions the page appears as a source for. |
| "Engines" | Which AI platforms have cited the page. |
| "Last cited" | When the page was most recently cited. |
You can filter the table using "All", "Cited", and "Not cited".
What about pages that have never been cited?
For Klarvu to show pages under "Not cited", your website needs to have been crawled first.
This is done under "Site maps".
If an important page hasn't been cited, it may be worth investigating why.
Perhaps the content doesn't clearly answer the questions customers ask. Maybe important information is missing, or AI systems have difficulty accessing the page.
You can use "Crawlability Checker" to investigate accessibility and "Content Checker" to review the content itself.
Keep in mind that a page not being cited doesn't automatically mean there's something wrong with it.
How to use source data
You don't need to investigate every source individually. Start with the websites that appear frequently or seem particularly relevant to your business.
Find the most-cited domains
Open "All sources" and look at which websites AI references most often.
Are they review platforms, industry publications, comparison websites, or competitors' own sites? This gives you a sense of which types of sources appear in your market.
Investigate sources that mention competitors
Go to "Sources that favour competitors" and look for pages where competitors appear but your brand doesn't.
Consider whether there are legitimate opportunities to be included through reviews, product comparisons, editorial coverage, or discussions in relevant communities.
Check which of your pages AI cites
Open "Your pages" and see which pages appear as sources and which prompts they're associated with.
This can help you understand which parts of your content AI uses when answering questions related to your industry.
Look for content gaps
Compare the topics covered by frequently cited competitor pages with the content on your own website.
Are there questions you don't answer particularly well? Are you missing a useful comparison, product description, or guide?
Use what you find to prioritize content worth improving or creating.
Source data helps you understand which websites AI references, which businesses those websites mention, and where your own content appears. It's a useful starting point for identifying areas worth investigating as you work on your AI visibility.