Citation share by topic: who owns a topic in AI answers?
Visibility says whether you are named; citation share says how much of a topic's sources are yours. Here is how to measure both by topic.
You can be named in an AI answer and still not own the topic. A brand mentioned once in a list of seven is present, not dominant. The question strategy teams actually want answered is different: for this subject, whose pages do the engines lean on? That is ownership, and a single overall visibility number cannot show it.
This guide explains the difference between visibility, citation share and share of voice at topic level, how to estimate them by hand, and where a tool saves the work.
Three metrics that sound alike
They answer different questions, so keep them separate:
- Visibility is how often your brand appears in answers for a set of prompts. It says whether you are in the room.
- Share of voice is how much of the brand mentions in those answers belong to you versus competitors. It says how loud you are against rivals.
- Citation share is how many of the cited sources in those answers are your pages, as a fraction of all citations. It says whose content the engines trust to build the answer.
You can score high on one and low on another. A brand can be mentioned often because it is well known, while the citations all go to third-party reviews. That brand has visibility without citation share, and its position depends on pages it does not control.
The reverse also happens. A smaller publisher might have many citations on a narrow topic while rarely being named as a brand. Our post on the difference between a mention and a citation explains why that gap exists.
Why topic level matters
Averages across all your prompts mask the pattern. You may own pricing questions and have no presence on integration questions. Grouping prompts by topic shows where you lead, where you trail and where nobody dominates. The last category is the opportunity, since an open topic is cheaper to win than a contested one.
Estimating it by hand
For a small set, you can calculate citation share yourself:
- Group prompts into topics. Five to ten prompts per topic is enough.
- Run them and list every cited URL in each answer.
- Mark each citation as yours or not. Use your domains, including subdomains.
- Divide. Your citations divided by all citations for that topic gives the share.
- Compare topics and competitors. Repeat the count for the domains of your top competitors.
This is tedious and the numbers swing between runs, so the more samples you take, the better. A topic with 8 prompts run daily for two weeks gives you something stable. Three manual runs do not.
What to look for in a tool
For this analysis, a tool should offer:
- Topic grouping that carries across every view.
- A citation share figure alongside visibility, position, share of voice and sentiment, so you can compare the metrics at once.
- A way to compare against competitors and to see where you rank within the topic.
- A link between topics and your site's pages, so you can find which pages underdeliver.
Our post on citation rate covers related measures at page level.
Where Promptwatch fits
Promptwatch gave Topics its own page on October 26, 2026. According to the changelog, Topics moved out of the Prompts tabs and now sits under Trends. Every topic and its prompts show five brand metrics: Visibility, Citation Share, Avg. Position, Share of Voice and Sentiment.
Citation Share is the new one. It is defined as the citations of your sites divided by all citations in the topic's answers, which is the calculation in the manual method, done for you across all prompts in the topic.
The same entry covers how to read it:
- By Competitor and By Rank views. Each has a switcher to pick which metric to compare. So you can ask "who has the highest citation share in this topic" and "where do I rank by position", without leaving the page.
- Tooltips. Each view explains itself on its tab.
- By Rank replaced the older name By Position on Topics and Prompts.
Two neighbouring features help. GEO 360 Topic insights group every page of your site into topics and show the average AI crawls, citations and clicks per page, so you can see which of your own topics AI engines pick up and which sit idle. Heatmaps compare any two dimensions, such as brands against topics or models against countries, which shows at a glance where a rival dominates. Our guide to the visibility heatmap and brand aliases shows how to read one.
The changelog does not name a plan for the Topics page, so I will not attach one. Prompt tracking itself starts on the free Explore plan with 10 prompts and ChatGPT only, and paid plans unlock all models.
I recommend starting here because citation share is the number that tells you whether your content is doing the work. A high-visibility, low-citation-share topic is a warning that your position depends on someone else's pages.
How to act on the numbers
High visibility, low citation share. You are named but not cited. Look at which sources the engines use, and build pages that cover what those sources cover, with clearer facts. Check whether your pages are being crawled at all.
Low visibility, high citation share. Your content is trusted but your brand is not named. Make sure pages state who you are and what you offer plainly, so the engine has a name to attach.
Low on both. Decide whether the topic is worth contesting. If competitors have high citation share and you have little content, you need a page that deserves the citation, not a tweak.
Nobody owns it. Pick it first. Write the most complete, factual page on it and track the share over several weeks.
Citation share moves slowly, because engines refetch on their own schedule. Judge a change over weeks, and compare against the same prompts, not new ones.
A weekly routine
- Open the Topics page for the last 30 days.
- Sort by Citation Share and note the three weakest topics that matter commercially.
- Switch to By Competitor to see who leads each.
- Open the cited pages of the leader to see what they cover.
- Choose one topic and one page to write or improve this week.
For wider context on tracking sources, see our roundup of citation tracking tools. The principle is to measure ownership at topic level, since the topic is the unit buyers care about.