Building Your Content Portfolio from Citation Data

Key Concepts

Citation Supply Chain - The chain of source pages AI engines search, pull from, and cite when building answers. Citations reveal exactly which URLs powered a given answer, making them the root-cause data behind your visibility numbers.

Visibility-Citation Gap - When your brand has high visibility (engines mention you often) but low citation share (engines rarely cite your own pages as a source). This means your presence in answers is carried by third-party content that talks about you, not by your own content. Whether this gap is a problem depends on whether you have content that should be getting cited. A brand like Delta Airlines wouldn't publish "best airlines" guides, so low citations there is expected. A company with blogs, guides, and product docs showing this gap has a content performance problem.

Domain Mix - The composition of domain types in your top-cited sources. The mix tells you which playbook to run:

• Companies/competitors dominate: Owned content can break in. Engines are comfortable citing company blogs for this topic.
• Institutions dominate (government sites, Wikipedia, FEMA): Owned content faces a steep climb. Lean on partnerships or earned media.
• Earned media/publishers dominate (review sites, affiliate content): Your route is through those publishers via coverage or paid placements.

Quick Reference

Starting altitude for citations: topic level

Unlike visibility analysis (where you drill to prompt level immediately), citations share a supply chain across prompts in a topic. Start at the topic level, then drill into a specific prompt only if something looks off.

Reading the citation view:

1. Filter to your preferred platforms
2. Filter by topic
3. Open the Citations tab
4. Ask: Am I in here? Check your domain's citation rank and share percentage.
5. Read the domain mix. What kinds of sites dominate the top 10? Companies, institutions, publishers, social platforms?
6. Scroll to individual pages. Read the URL slugs to identify the dominant content format (listicles, how-to guides, comparison posts) before you even click.
7. Check the Mentioned on Page column. Are any top-cited pages already talking about you?
8. Look for content gaps. Are any of the top-cited pages actually answering the specific prompt perfectly, or are they broad pieces that only partially address it?

Diagnosing what to do:

• Low visibility, low citations, competitor companies dominating: Create new owned content in the winning format. Nurture third-party pages already mentioning you.
• High visibility, low citations, and you have relevant content: Your content exists but is underperforming. Restructure, refresh, or improve extractability. This is not a "create more" problem, it's a "fix what you have" problem.
• No top-cited page answers the specific prompt directly: That's a gap. Build something purpose-built for that question, not as a subsection of a broader piece.

Using the Content Creation tool:

1. Navigate to Content > Create
2. Choose Blog Post or Listicle (the citation data tells you which format is winning)
3. Select your topic and target prompt
4. Filter to your preferred platforms
5. The tool automatically scrapes top-cited pages and generates a brief grounded in what's actually earning citations

Agents - The same diagnosis-to-brief workflow can be automated on a schedule via the Agents tab. The Content Brief Creation template chains source analysis with brief generation and can be customized with additional nodes (e.g., Slack notifications, deeper page analysis).