How to Find Who AI Cites in Your Niche

Knowing your visibility score is a start, but the more useful question is usually "if not us, then who?" This tutorial walks through finding out exactly which domains AI engines cite in your niche and why.

Step 1: Set up a project and prompt list

Citation tracking depends on having real scan data to look at, so start the same way any CiteCue project does: create a project, let AI Context auto-fill your brand description, personas, competitors and topics from your website, and build out a prompt list in Prompts Monitoring that reflects the actual questions your buyers ask. If this is your first project, the brand tracking setup walkthrough covers this in detail, and our guide to choosing prompts for AI visibility tracking helps you build a list worth scanning.

Step 2: Run a scan

Run a scan to send your prompts through the AI engines on your plan with live web search enabled. Each answer is recorded in full, along with every source the AI cited to build it, so you get the whole evidence trail behind the response rather than a yes/no on whether your brand appeared.

Step 3: Open Citations

Once the scan finishes, head to Citations. This is where CiteCue aggregates every domain cited across your scanned prompts (yours, your competitors', and third parties like review sites, comparison blogs and forums) and ranks each one by influence: how often it's cited and how consistently it shows up across different answers. A domain that's cited occasionally is worth noting. A domain that shows up in nearly every answer in your category is the one actually shaping what AI tells your buyers.

This is usually where the first surprise happens. The site with the most influence in your niche is rarely your own, and it's often not even a direct competitor. It might be a review platform, an industry comparison site, or a forum thread that keeps getting pulled into answers because it reads as neutral and detailed. Our post on how AI engines choose citations digs into why those neutral sources win so often.

Step 4: Open Competitors for the head-to-head view

Citations tells you who's trusted in general; Competitors tells you specifically who's winning against you. The competitor list is the one you set (or CiteCue detected) back in AI Context, and this module measures your visibility directly against each of them, prompt by prompt. When a competitor is recommended over you, both brands get scored 1-10 across 13 ranking factors, with content authority, review volume, structured content and FAQ quality among them, so you're not left guessing why they won that particular answer.

Step 5: Read the factor gaps, not just the score

The number that matters least here is the overall comparison score. What matters is the specific factors where the gap is largest, because those are the ones you can actually act on. A competitor that consistently wins on FAQ quality is telling you something concrete about how their pages are structured versus yours. A competitor that wins mainly on review volume is telling you something about your reputation footprint outside your own site.

Step 6: Turn it into action

Citation tracking on its own is diagnostic. The useful next step is feeding what you found into Content Fixes, which turns your biggest factor gaps into a prioritized, ready-to-apply queue of specific changes; our content fixes workflow tutorial walks through that end to end. From there it's the same loop as brand monitoring: make the change, run another scan, and check Citations again to see whether your influence (or a competitor's) actually shifted.

Repeat this over a few scan cycles and you build a real picture of your niche: whose content the AI actually pulls from, and what it would take to be one of those sources instead.