Source Attribution
In one line
Source attribution is the way AI answers expose where the information came from — citation cards, footnotes or inline links that let users verify the claim and click through.
Going deeper
Source attribution covers every way an AI answer exposes its origins — Perplexity's numbered footnotes, ChatGPT Search's inline links, AI Overviews' citation cards. The format differs but the purpose is the same: show where the claim came from.
For marketers it is just about the only direct traffic channel left. Even after the AI has done the talking, a meaningful share of users still click the source link, and those clicks make up what 'organic traffic' looks like in the GEO era.
Beware of cross-surface comparisons. Card-style citations get clicked far more than tiny links collected at the bottom of an answer. It is more accurate to set a per-surface KPI than to roll everything into one number.
Related terms
Citation Rate
Citation rate is the share of a defined prompt set in which an AI answer cites your brand or domain — the headline KPI of GEO.
GEO·AEOAI Referral Traffic
AI Referral Traffic is the visit traffic flowing to your site from AI search surfaces — ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and similar.
GEO·AEOPerplexity
Perplexity is an answer engine that turns search results into a single cited answer, attaching a numbered source to every sentence — making it a common reference surface for measuring GEO performance.
GEO·AEOAI Overview
Google AI Overviews is the AI-generated summary that appears above the standard results in Google Search — one of the most prominent zero-click surfaces today.
GEO·AEOGrounding
Grounding is the practice of anchoring an LLM's answer to external evidence — retrieved documents, search results, structured data — to push factual accuracy higher.