Am I cited?
What is citation rank in AI answers?
Citation rank is the 1-based position of your page in an AI engine's cited-sources list: rank 1 means your page was the first source listed, rank 2 the second, and so on. Seeklyn captures rank from every observed engine check and feeds it into the citation-likelihood formula as its highest-weight signal (45%), mapped through 5 retrieval tiers — rank 1 scores 1.00, ranks 2–3 score 0.85, and ranks 11+ score 0.15.
Citation rank appears alongside match level in the "Am I Cited?" engine results — run a check free at /dashboard/cited.
How is citation rank measured?
Citation rank is the position your page holds in the list of sources an AI engine attaches to its answer, numbered from 1. Seeklyn reads the ordered reference list from each engine response and assigns rank to the best-matching reference for your target URL. If your page is the 3rd source listed, rank = 3. If your page does not appear, rank = 0 and the cited field is false.
Rank comes directly from the citation list in the actual AI answer, tracked across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and more. Seeklyn does not estimate it: if the engine listed your page third, the rank is 3.
Rank is always scoped to a single (engine, query, check) triple. The same page can hold different ranks on different engines or for different queries.
How does rank affect citation likelihood?
Rank feeds into the citation-likelihood formula as the retrieval-rank signal, the highest-weight component at 45%. The formula does not use rank directly — it converts rank to a retrieval score through 5 locked tiers before weighting, so the relationship is not linear.
5 tiers map rank to a retrieval score: rank 1 = 1.00, ranks 2–3 = 0.85, ranks 4–6 = 0.60, ranks 7–10 = 0.35, and any rank above 10 = 0.15. Not appearing at all (rank 0) scores 0.00 — a genuine signal, not missing data. A page at rank 4 (0.60 retrieval score) that also has strong fan-out coverage and high citability can still reach a "likely" likelihood band, because rank is not the only input.
| Rank | Retrieval score | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1.00 | Top source — maximum retrieval signal |
| 2–3 | 0.85 | High visibility — strong retrieval signal |
| 4–6 | 0.60 | Mid-page — moderate retrieval signal |
| 7–10 | 0.35 | Bottom of page — weak retrieval signal |
| 11+ | 0.15 | Beyond page 1 — marginal retrieval signal |
| 0 (not cited) | 0.00 | Not retrieved — retrieval gate failed |
Why does rank 1 matter disproportionately?
Rank 1 scores a retrieval value of 1.00 — the maximum — while rank 2 scores 0.85. That 15-point drop from first to second reflects how AI engines weight their own source lists: the top-ranked source in a generative answer typically receives the most prose coverage and is most likely to be paraphrased or quoted. Being second is still a strong position, but first-source status correlates with the greatest passage-level visibility in the generated answer.
For every engine it tracks, Seeklyn reports the actual rank so you can see exactly where in the source list your page appeared. The same rank also feeds the citation-likelihood forecast, which is always labeled inferred.
Frequently asked questions
Is citation rank the same as search ranking?
No. Search ranking is the position of your page in a traditional organic results page (a list of links). Citation rank is the position of your page in the source list an AI engine attaches to its synthesized answer. A page can rank highly in organic search yet not appear in any AI citation, and vice versa — the citation source list is curated by the engine's generative layer, not just by the organic ranking.
Can I directly optimize for citation rank 1?
Not directly — AI engines control their source ordering. But the 4 signals in the citation-likelihood formula (retrieval rank, fan-out coverage, citability, competition density) all influence which sources the engine selects. Improving those signals increases the probability of appearing at a higher rank, though no tool can guarantee a specific rank position.
What does rank = 0 mean in Seeklyn's output?
Rank 0 means your page was not found in the engine's cited sources or results for this query — the cited field will be false and the match level will be "none". A rank of 0 is a real data point (retrieval score 0.00), not a null value. It means the retrieval gate failed for this engine and query combination.