How Mentsight will preserve citation evidence

Mention versus citation

A mention means your business name appeared somewhere in the answer. In Mentsight, Cited means one of the returned citation links points to your website. A business can be mentioned without its website being cited, so the two results answer different questions.

A Mentsight report will also keep external citations visible. A third-party directory, publication, association, or review site may appear in the returned links, but it is not an owned citation from your website.

What a citation does, and does not, prove

• It shows that your page appeared in the citation links returned for that response.
• It identifies the page returned with that response.
• It gives a person evidence to inspect rather than a claim to accept blindly.
• It does not prove a universal ranking, authority score, or future visibility.
• It does not establish that the cited page caused the answer or recommendation.

How Mentsight will preserve citation evidence

After you approve the prompts, Mentsight will send them to a web-grounded AI provider and retain the full response and citation URLs returned for that run. The report will separate owned from external citations and keep the prompt beside the answer so the context remains inspectable.

Mentsight will record the citation details returned by the provider. Links can be incomplete, redirect elsewhere, or change later, so each report will be a dated snapshot. The methodology page explains the evidence model in more detail.

Find patterns worth investigating

Across multiple reports, look for patterns: your business may be mentioned but rarely cited, one service page may appear repeatedly, or external sources may cover topics your site does not explain. Those patterns can suggest a useful next step, but Mentsight does not promise that an edit will change a future answer.

Explore the example AI visibility report to see mentions, citations, competitors, and opportunities together.