Metric Definitions
This page provides a complete reference for every metric used in the Cited platform. Understanding these metrics helps you interpret your dashboard, prioritize actions, and track progress over time.
Primary Metrics
AI Visibility Score (0--100)
Your AI Visibility Score is a composite indicator that reflects how well-positioned your business is to appear in AI-generated search results. It aggregates signals across content quality, technical readiness, structured data, trust factors, and actual citation performance.
A score of 0 means AI systems have no meaningful data about your business. A score of 100 means your presence is fully optimized across every dimension the platform measures. Most businesses fall somewhere between 30 and 70 when they first start tracking.
The score updates after each audit cycle and reflects changes you have made since the previous measurement.
Cited KPI
The Cited KPI measures the percentage of relevant AI-generated responses that include a citation to your domain. It answers the question: "When AI is asked about topics I should be visible for, how often does it mention me?"
This metric is calculated by running a set of queries relevant to your business across multiple AI platforms and checking whether your domain appears in the cited sources.
A higher Cited KPI means AI systems are regularly referencing your content when users ask questions in your space.
Share of Voice
Share of Voice compares your citation frequency against tracked competitors. If there are five businesses in your competitive set and you are cited in 30% of the relevant queries while the next closest competitor is cited in 20%, your share of voice is leading.
This metric helps you understand your relative position in the market. Even if your absolute citation rate is growing, your share of voice may be shrinking if competitors are improving faster.
Coverage Score
Coverage Score measures how many of the questions relevant to your business you are visible for. If there are 50 questions that a potential customer might ask about your industry, and AI cites you in responses to 20 of them, your coverage score reflects that breadth.
This differs from the Cited KPI in that it emphasizes breadth rather than frequency. A high coverage score means you are visible across a wide range of topics. A low coverage score means your visibility is concentrated in a narrow set of queries.
Citation Rate
Citation Rate is the average number of citations your domain receives per question. A question might generate a response that cites you once, twice, or not at all. The citation rate averages this across all tracked queries.
A citation rate above 1.0 means that, on average, you are being cited more than once per question -- which can happen when multiple pages on your site are referenced in a single AI response.
Health Metrics
Health metrics evaluate specific dimensions of your online presence. Each is scored on a scale that feeds into the overall AI Visibility Score.
Content Quality
Assesses how well your content serves AI citation needs. Factors include depth of information, clarity of writing, use of specific data points, and how directly your content answers common questions. Content that is vague, promotional, or thin scores lower.
Crawl Coverage
Measures how accessible your site is to AI crawlers. This checks your robots.txt configuration, meta tags, HTTP headers, and whether key pages are reachable by GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and ClaudeBot. Pages blocked from AI crawlers cannot be cited.
Trust Score
Evaluates the trust signals present on your site. This includes customer reviews, professional certifications, author bios with verifiable credentials, an informative about page, contact information, and references from other authoritative domains.
Schema Completeness
Measures how thoroughly you have implemented structured data markup. The platform checks for relevant Schema.org types (Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article, LocalBusiness, etc.) and evaluates whether the markup is complete, valid, and provides meaningful information to AI systems.
AI Readiness
A combined measure of how prepared your site is for AI consumption. This rolls up crawl coverage, schema completeness, content structure, and technical factors into a single readiness indicator. A site with high AI readiness has removed all barriers to being understood and cited by AI systems.
Buyer Clarity
Assesses how clearly your content communicates what you sell, who you serve, and why someone should choose you. AI systems need to match businesses to buyer intent. If your site does not clearly articulate your value proposition, AI cannot confidently recommend you.
Brand Confidence
Measures how consistently your brand identity is represented across the web. This includes consistent naming (NAP -- Name, Address, Phone), aligned descriptions across directories, social profiles that match your website, and a coherent brand narrative that AI systems can reliably extract.
Action Scoring
When the platform generates recommendations, each action is scored on three dimensions to help you prioritize.
Priority Score (0--100)
An overall priority ranking that combines impact, effort, and urgency. Actions with the highest priority scores deliver the most value for the least effort and address time-sensitive issues. Use this score to decide what to work on first.
Impact Score
Estimates the expected improvement to your AI visibility if you implement the action. A high impact score means the action is likely to produce a measurable increase in citations or metric scores. Impact is estimated based on the type of change, how other businesses have responded to similar actions, and the current state of your profile.
Effort Score
Rates the implementation difficulty. A low effort score means the action is quick and straightforward -- for example, adding a single schema markup block. A high effort score means the action requires significant time, technical skill, or content creation -- for example, rewriting an entire content section or building a new page.
Confidence Score
Indicates how certain the platform is about its recommendation. A high confidence score means the system has strong evidence that the action will produce the predicted result. A low confidence score means the recommendation is based on limited data or general best practices rather than specific analysis of your situation.
Use the confidence score to calibrate your expectations. High-confidence, high-impact actions are the safest bets. Low-confidence actions may still be worth pursuing, but the outcome is less predictable.
Reading Your Dashboard
When reviewing metrics in the Cited dashboard, focus on trends rather than absolute numbers. A steady improvement in your AI Visibility Score over several audit cycles is more meaningful than any single measurement.
Use the Priority Score to drive your workflow. Start with the highest-priority actions, implement them, then run a new audit to measure the impact. Over time, this cycle of audit, act, and measure drives sustained improvement in your AI search visibility.