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Sources

When AI assistants answer with evidence, they point at URLs. Presence records every one of those sources so you can see which pages the models treat as trustworthy evidence - yours, your competitors', and third parties you may never have heard of.

The Citations screen is where you read them. Three words carry the whole subject:

  • A is one event: one answer used one URL as a source. The same URL used by ten answers is ten citations.
  • A site is the domain those pages live on - g2.com, reddit.com, your own domain.
  • A page is one distinct URL - g2.com/products/yourbrand/reviews.

A mention is being named in the answer. Being used as a source is being used as evidence. You can be mentioned without being used as a source, and used as a source without being the brand the assistant recommends first. Both matter.

Retrieved is not the same as cited

Assistants do two separate things with the pages they read. A citation is a page the answer visibly points to - the reference attached to a claim. But some assistants also disclose pages they retrieved while composing the answer and then never referenced.

The gap between the two is a real signal. A page that keeps being retrieved but never cited is being found and passed over, which is a very different problem from a page that is never found at all. The first is a content problem, the second is a discoverability problem, and they need opposite fixes.

Only Gemini and Perplexity publish retrieval data, so it appears only on the detail view of an individual response - the source lists, counts, and charts everywhere else count cited pages only. An assistant with no retrieval detail is not reading nothing; it just does not say what it read.

Why sources matter

  • They show which of your pages earn attribution when assistants explain a topic.
  • They reveal competitor and publisher pages that keep winning the evidence slot.
  • They connect Presence (who gets credited) to website work (whether those pages are reachable, fresh, and structured for AI).

For a city government, sources might cluster on permit instruction pages and recycling schedules. For a university, on program pages and research summaries. For a corporate brand, on product specs and comparison guides.

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Sources | Silktide Help