AI mentions vs citations
Search and answer engines can name your brand without sending anyone to your pages. This page is the glossary for that gap. The product that measures it is AI Visibility.
What is a mention?
A mention is your brand name appearing in an AI answer. The model knows the name. It may not link to you.
What is a citation?
A citation is the model pointing at a URL or source. That is citeable evidence, not just name awareness.
Why the difference matters
Mentions without citations mean awareness without traffic. Cool Web Tool reports both. We do not invent volumes or publish ungated per-brand score pages.
How a scan records both
Open AI Visibility on a project and run a scan. The scan sends the same prompts to the providers on your plan and stores two fields for each answer. A mention means the brand name appears in the text. A citation means the answer includes a URL. Read mentions in the score breakdown. Read citation URLs on the Citations tab.
Free includes site audits only, so this scan does not run there. Starter includes ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity. Claude is included on Professional and above. This page is a glossary. It does not show a score for a brand until that brand has a scan on a project you can open. An empty Citations tab means that prompt returned no URL. That is a missing result, not a score of zero.
FAQ
What is the difference between AI mentions and citations?
A mention is your brand name in an AI answer. A citation is a URL the model points at. Mentions without citations mean the model knows the name but is not sending people to your pages.
Does Cool Web Tool track both?
Yes. AI visibility scans record mentions and citation URLs across ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity. Claude is Professional+. Scans start on Starter, not Free.
Where do I measure this in the product?
Open AI Visibility on a project after a scan. Mentions show in the score breakdown. Citation URLs show on the Citations tab.
