What's the difference between a brand mention and a citation in AI visibility?

A brand mention is any place your name appears across the web — an unlinked reference in an article, a listing, a review, a forum post — while a citation is when an AI assistant actually draws on a specific source and attributes part of its answer to it. Both matter, but they play different roles. Mentions build the corroboration layer: the more that independent, credible sources reference your business consistently, the more confident a model becomes that you're a real, notable entity worth naming. Citations are the payoff: they're the sources the assistant leans on in the moment it answers, and being the cited source is how you get quoted and named rather than just quietly counted. The practical implication is that you want both — a broad base of consistent mentions across trusted places to establish that you exist and matter, and strong, extractable content on high-authority sources so you become one of the pages the model actually cites when it builds an answer.

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