Cited Domains & Cited Pages

These are the Cited domains and Cited Pages reports. Both help you identify the top sources mentioning AND citing your brand in AI answers.

In short, the websites LLMs train their data on.

They’re important to measure because most AI citations for your brand come from third party websites, not your own.

For example, in Ahrefs’s case, Zapier, YouTube, and Reddit are the most cited websites in AI Overviews.

The same pattern applies to ChatGPT, where Ahrefs’ website is still not mentioned in the Top 3 AI citations.

Here are some actionable use cases for this report.

Find your top pages getting cited in AI search

These are the pages on your website that get referenced the most.

To find them, search for your brand, go to the Cited domains report, and click on the Pages number under your domain. Ahrefs.com in our case.

Then check each AI platform to find citation patterns.

For example, AI Overviews are mostly citing our free seo tools.

ChatGPT is citing our “pricing” page and blog posts on various seo topics.

Find the content formats AI frequently cites for your topic

As we’ve previously noticed, AI chatbots prefer different types of content.

To find what format dominates each AI platform, type in your niche or topic, and go to the Cited Pages report.

For the SEO niche, it’s mostly “best type” listicles for “best website builders” and “best seo tool”.

Increase your citations on Reddit

According to Ahrefs study on the 10 most cited domains in LLMs, Reddit is the 3rd most cited domain in AI search, yet most people ignore it.

To find subreddits relevant to your niche, add the niche in Brand Radar.

Go to the Cited pages report, and filter for pages coming from reddit.com.

Here, I’ve identified over 2000 subreddits which talk about SEO topics in general and are being pulled in AI answers.

The next step would be to contribute with thoughtful answers to those communities.

And if you want to see what subreddits your brand is already being mentioned on, you can add a filter where the AI response includes your brand.

Find AI citation gaps where your competitors get cited, but you don’t

These are websites and publications where there’s a higher chance of getting cited on, since your competitors are already referenced.

To find such opportunities, perform an empty search in Brand Radar.

Go to the Cited Pages report. And a filter where the domain cited doesn’t include your own domain, but it includes your competitors’.

We’ll also exclude citations from competitors by adding a domain filter: doesn’t contain salesforce and zoho.com.

And we’ve got 38000 pages where Pipedrive could be cited on AI Overviews alone.

Don’t forget to rinse and repeat this for your preferred AI chatbot.