Citation Tracker
The component that detects and attributes brand and product citations in an answer.
What is a citation tracker?
A citation tracker is the component that detects and attributes the brand and product citations inside an AI answer — finding where a brand is cited or mentioned, and assigning each detection to the right brand or product entity.
The citation tracker is the eyes of the measurement layer: nothing in the SOV pyramid is computed until it has parsed who got cited.
An AI answer is just prose plus a list of sources. The citation tracker reads both, using a word-boundary matcher and the Brand Kit’s aliases and product names to find every mention and every cited URL that belongs to the brand. It then attributes each detection to a specific entity, so a mention of a product rolls up correctly to its parent brand.
Accurate attribution is what keeps Share of Voice honest. A loose matcher invents mentions (counting "dependency mapping" as the brand "Dependency") or misses aliased product names; the citation tracker uses explicit Brand Kit aliases and product lists to avoid both false positives and false negatives.
Everything downstream depends on it. Mention rate, Word Count Share, PWC, First Mention Position and Citation Authority Score are all computed from the brand and product citations the tracker surfaces — so its precision sets the ceiling on the whole pyramid’s trustworthiness.