Watch: Citation
A grounding source the model surfaces to the reader as a reference: a subset of what it retrieved, and an attribution of a source rather than a mention of your brand.
Transcript
When an AI model answers a query, there is a big difference between where it gets its information, what it references, and what it actually says.
Every citation starts as a grounding source, but most grounding sources are never cited. The model retrieves a massive amount of information behind the scenes, but only shows you a tiny subset. Think of a citation as the bibliography. It tells you where a claim came from, but it doesn't mean your brand was actually named in the response.
That brings us to mentions. A mention is when a brand actually appears in the readable text of the answer. These two things can easily diverge. An AI might cite your website as evidence, while actually recommending your competitor in the sentence itself. As the saying goes, citations are the bibliography, not the brainstorm.
This gap creates a major trap for anyone trying to track AI visibility. If a tracking tool reports that you were cited as a grounding source, and treats it as if you were cited in the final answer, it is counting the wrong thing. You are measuring a completely different layer of the pipeline, and missing the part that carries the real commercial weight.