A journal from CitationLab
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Search is changing.
Here we separate signal from noise.
Articles, analyses and practical perspectives on how brands are understood, cited and recommended by AI.
Editor's pick
Insight before action.
AI visibility · Perspective
ABC: the path to profitable AI visibility
Visibility is not the goal. It is an intermediary. The path from an AI model knowing you exist to money in the bank runs through three problems that share a name: the model's memory, retrieval at search time, and the handover from citation to customer. They demand entirely different work, and most people only work on one of them.
From the editors
Latest insight.
36 articles in this selection
Measurement & Tools
AI is sending traffic to pages you don't have
AI assistants send users to URLs that don't exist on your site. Hallucination gets the blame, but the dominant cause today is stale memory — a model pointing at the URL structure you abandoned two migrations ago.
Measurement & Tools
Ten prompts to run against your own brand today
You don't need a tool to find out AI barely knows your brand. You need ten minutes and these ten prompts, each designed so a bad answer is the likely result for most companies.
Measurement & Tools
How to Get AEO Into the 2027 Budget Without Asking for New Money
You don't need a bigger budget to fund AEO in 2027 — you need a better argument for moving money you're already reallocating. Here's the case, built from Gartner, Forrester and Duke's CMO Survey.
AI & Search
AI search in 2027: five predictions, each with data behind it
Most "AI search in 2027" predictions are opinions with a year attached. These five are sourced to named forecasts and measured studies — including one honest correction of a widely-cited 2024 prediction that didn't play out as forecast.
Glossary
What is an MCP server? How AI connects to tools and data
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the open standard that lets AI models connect to external tools and data sources. An MCP server is the part that actually exposes those tools, data and templates to the model. Here is the difference between the protocol and the server, how tools, resources and prompts work, and why CitationLab publishes its own MCP servers.
Glossary
What is an AI agent? Agentic AI explained
An AI agent is a system that plans, uses tools and completes multi-step tasks toward a goal — unlike a chatbot that just answers one question at a time. Here is what agentic AI actually is, how autonomy varies, and why it changes how brands get discovered and recommended.
Glossary
What is NLWeb? Making your website agent-ready
NLWeb is an open project from Microsoft that makes websites conversational and queryable by AI agents — using schema.org and other existing web formats together with the Model Context Protocol. Every NLWeb instance can act as an MCP server. Here is what NLWeb is, how it relates to agent-ready websites, and what CitationLab does with it.
Glossary
What is an agent-ready website? agents.md and llms.txt explained
An agent-ready website is built so AI agents can read, understand and act on its content — not just humans. It comes down to semantic HTML, schema.org, llms.txt, agents.md and clean APIs. Here is what each part does, why it decides whether AI cites you, and how Citation Sites are built agent-ready from the start.
Glossary
What are agent payments? A2A and AP2 explained
Agent payments are when AI agents complete purchases and payments on the user's behalf — and they require new protocols for trust and identity. Agent2Agent (A2A) lets agents talk to each other; Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) proves a purchase is really what the user asked for. Here is how they work and how they relate to MCP, UCP and ACP.
Our editorial line
Expertise first.
Always.
Sources, not big words.
We show what our conclusions rest on, and separate documented findings from our own assessments.
Useful in practice.
The insight should help you make a better decision. Not just hand you one more term to keep track of.
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