CAS (Citation Authority Score)
The L3 quality component scoring the authority of client-owned citations only.
What is CAS?
Citation Authority Score (CAS) is the L3 quality component scoring the mean authority of the client-owned citations only — the brand’s and its products’ sources — not of every URL the engine cites.
CAS asks not just whether your sources are cited, but how trustworthy the engine considers the ones it pulls from you.
When an answer engine cites sources, some belong to the brand and some do not. CAS isolates the client-owned citations — pages from the brand and its products — and scores their mean authority, computed from a domain-authority lookup with per-workspace overrides. It explicitly ignores the authority of third-party URLs the engine happens to cite.
This isolation is what makes CAS actionable. A high overall citation count can be flattering yet hollow if the engine is leaning on competitors and analysts rather than on you. By measuring only your own cited sources, CAS tells you whether the content you control is trusted enough to be quoted.
CAS sits at L3 Quality of the SOV pyramid with PWC, First Mention Position and sentiment. It is the metric that turns "build authority" from a slogan into a number: raise the domain authority and citation-worthiness of brand-owned pages, and CAS rises with it.