Glossary /AI search & GEO
LLM Citation
A reference to a source inside a generated answer, which is the AI-search equivalent of a ranking position.
An LLM citation is the assistant naming a source in its answer. It is the visibility that matters in AI search, and it is won at retrieval time: the system pulls passages it judges relevant, composes an answer from them, and attributes what it used.
What gets retrieved is a passage, not a page. That places a premium on writing where a single section stands on its own — a definition that is complete in one paragraph, a claim with its evidence attached, a heading that accurately labels what follows. Content whose meaning depends on three sections of build-up rarely survives being chunked.
Being fetchable is the precondition. Most assistants read the server’s HTML response and do not execute JavaScript, so content that only exists after client-side rendering is not a candidate for citation regardless of quality.