AI answers — especially search-grounded ones — cite sources. The Citation Gap answers: which sources do AI answers in your category rely on, and are you one of them?
How it works
The search-grounded channel in every scan feeds live Brave web results to the model, and the model's answers cite the URLs it drew from. The direct model channels can also surface sources. Every cited URL in your scan's answers is extracted, grouped by domain, and compared against your own domain.
The result is a ranked list of the domains AI answers actually cite for your buyer questions, with your own domain highlighted — or conspicuously absent.
Why it matters
Being mentioned and being cited are different games:
- If your domain is never cited, the AI is describing your category using other people's content. Your story is being told — or omitted — by third parties.
- The domains that dominate the citation list are the watering holes of your category: directories, review sites, comparison blogs, industry publications. Presence there feeds directly into AI answers.
Closing the gap
- Fix your own site first. If crawlers are blocked or your pages lack the structure models parse well, you can't be cited. Run through the website diagnosis.
- Get onto the domains that are already cited. If review platform X and directory Y dominate your category's citations, being listed (and well-reviewed) there matters more than another blog post on your own site.
- Publish citable content. Pages that directly answer buyer questions — comparisons, pricing explainers, FAQs — are what grounded answers cite. Marketing fluff is not.
- Re-scan and watch the trend. Citation lists shift slowly. Weekly monitoring shows whether your domain starts appearing.