The citations
A citation counts
when an engine uses it,
not when the page
goes live.
An earned citation is a page a company neither owns nor paid for, which an engine cites in an answer to one of its tracked questions, or which names the company in a way the engine then repeats. Publishing the page is not the event. Appearing in the tracked answers is, and that is the only thing counted.
Owned, paid, earned
A citation is a page an engine names as its source, or reads and repeats without naming. Three kinds, kept apart in the ledger, because a client who cannot tell them apart cannot check anything else in it.
The test is the same in all three cases, and it is applied to the answers rather than to the pages: a citation counts on the day it appears in a tracked answer, not on the day the page was published. A page that goes live and is never cited is work that did not land, and it is reported as work that did not land.
- Owned
- Your own site. Worth getting right, and never counted as evidence that somebody else vouched for you.
- Paid
- Ads, sponsored listings and paid placements. Legitimate spend, labelled as spend, and never entered in the ledger as earned.
- Earned
- A page you neither own nor paid for that an engine cites in an answer to a tracked question, or that names you in a way the engine repeats.
The census is the target list
GetMOW does not start from a list of publications it already has relationships with. The discovery run produces a citation census: every URL the engines cite when a rival is named and the client is not, ranked by how often it appears across the tracked questions. That ranking is the target list, and it belongs to the client’s category rather than to a template.
For go-to-market and revenue-technology SaaS the census usually includes the review platforms the engines cite for the category, G2, Capterra, TrustRadius and Gartner Peer Insights among them; independent roundups and comparison pages from industry publications and practitioners; partner and integration marketplaces; customer stories on partner blogs; community threads and forums; and YouTube reviews and podcast transcripts. Wikipedia enters only through notability, and GetMOW does not edit it.
Which of those matter for a given company is a finding rather than a promise, and the client sees it in month one. A vendor who can name your target publications before running your category has described their own contact list rather than your buyers’ reading.
The ledger, every month
Every target on the list appears in the monthly ledger in one of three states, with the link. Pitched means the request has gone out. Placed means the page is live. Cited means an engine used it in an answer to one of the tracked questions, and cited is the only one of the three that counts toward a result.
Movement nobody worked for is recorded in the same ledger and claimed by nobody. Engine updates, rival moves and attention spilling over from the brand as a whole appear as what they are, so a month that went well for reasons outside the work reads as a month that went well for reasons outside the work.
Questions about citations
- What counts as an earned citation?
- An earned citation is a page a company neither owns nor paid for that an AI engine cites in an answer to one of its tracked questions, or that names the company in a way the engine then repeats. Owned pages are the company’s own site and paid placements are advertising; both are tracked, and neither is ever entered in the ledger as earned.
- When does a citation start counting?
- On the day it appears in a tracked answer, not the day the page goes live. Getting a page published is the work; being used by an engine is the result, and only the result is counted. A placement that is live for a month without ever appearing in the tracked answers is reported as a placement that has not landed yet.
- Which sites does GetMOW target?
- Whichever sites the engines already cite in the client’s own category, ranked by how often they appear. The discovery run produces a citation census of every URL cited when a rival is named and the client is not, and that census is the target list. For go-to-market and revenue-technology SaaS it usually contains review platforms, independent roundups, partner marketplaces, customer stories, community threads and video or podcast transcripts.
- Does GetMOW edit Wikipedia?
- No. Wikipedia enters a citation census only through notability, which is a question of whether independent sources have written about a company at all, and GetMOW does not edit the encyclopedia on a client’s behalf. Editing an article about a company you are paid by is against Wikipedia’s own conflict-of-interest guidance, and a reverted edit is worse than no edit.
Sources
The definitions on this page are the ones used in a client’s monthly ledger. Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidance is linked because this page refuses a practice it describes. Read in September 2026.
Start with what the answers say about you.
Before you weigh any method, including this one, see the answer ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give today when a buyer asks who to consider in your category. The AI visibility report is free, written for your category, and yours whatever you do next.