AI Citations May Not Be As Useful As Touted, Especially For Informational Sites- An 80k Citations Site Result.

Following @Topiano's awesome thread, I had it in mind to work on AI citations for some of my projects. I remembered I had this site that was ranking really nicely on Bing for years, though things have significantly dropped. Checked out the site on Bing webmasters tool and realized there's a new 'AI Performance' feature on Bing webmaster tools. It's supposed to show your site's citations.

I was shocked to see that in the past 3 months this site had almost 80k citations. As seen in the screenshot below.
Now, the sad part is that these citations translated to almost no traffic from those AI platforms, just few very visits ChatGPT and Perplexity. This is possibly because of the content of my site. It's purely informational, so once AI tools lift the content and displays to the user, the user already has an answer for what brought them.

These are the downsides of AI, publishers are paying supplying them with absolutely free content and getting nothing in return, not even clicks.

Daily citations is in the higher hundreds.

For a business site, this would be incredibly useful and valuable. Possibly lead to great traffic to the site.


What do you think? Have you checked your sites and their AI performance?

I also have a similar experience. If it shows answer to the user, they'll just return. There is no need to visit our website.

If they just show link to a post like "you can remove image watermark online here," "get discount voucher here," "download app here," etc., the user has no option but to visit the site. So, it works like a CTA button on a landing page and brings visitors.

As an informational thread, it simply means that the Bing search crawls your website pages to reach the final output.
If you further audit the process and act like a regular user, you can prompt it to show where the chat gets its information from. Then, you’ll be provided with sources.


Perplexity is the only tool that comes with cited sources. AI citation is best for app, service, or direct product recommendations, like asking, “What’s the best product for X?” etc.

What do you think, does the higher number of citations by AI builds authority for other pages or overall website? As in this case its being cited 100s of times, will it mean there are chances some other pages which are not ai cited or where ai overview is not showing up can rank well ?

I think for informational sites AI overviews are worst but in the similar case for local seo / businesses it can perform really better as AI is giving user a defined answer or choice.

Starblazer said:

I also have a similar experience. If it shows answer to the user, they'll just return. There is no need to visit our website.

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Yea, there's absolutely no benefit to the website owner. User just get what they want without visiting source websites. It's our new sad reality.

Topiano said:

AI citation is best for app, service, or direct product recommendations, like asking, “What’s the best product for X?” etc.

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Absolutely, it'll most likely translate to an acquisition in such cases because these are direct users who looking for exactly that.

JessiPinkme said:

What do you think, does the higher number of citations by AI builds authority for other pages or overall website? As in this case its being cited 100s of times, will it mean there are chances some other pages which are not ai cited or where ai overview is not showing up can rank well ?

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I don't know. This website has about 11 pages cited. I would assuming it'll help other pages get cited too not ranked. So, what I'm thinking is that if said site is used to discuss products, such products could be mentioned and/or cited on AI answers/responses. I'll look into this more. It might be useful.