Free AI Citation Checker: Which of Your Pages Get Cited

A free citation check answers one question: which URLs on your site show up as sources in AI answers, and in which engine. It doesn't tell you why, and it doesn't tell you which pages shaped the answer without being cited.

Three free sources cover most of the ground as of October 2026:

• Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report. Page-level citation activity for Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.
• Google Search Console generative AI report. Impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, split by page, country, date and device.
• Your own answer log. What ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini cite when you ask them your buyers' questions.

None of these sources covers all engines. That's why you combine them.

Bing and Copilot

1. Sign in at bing.com/webmasters and verify your site. You can import a verified property from Search Console.
2. Open the AI Performance report. It has been in public preview since February 2026 and was expanded in June 2026.
3. Read the page-level citation activity. Export or screenshot it, because there is no API for this report.
4. Note the grounding queries next to each cited page. These are the queries the AI actually ran, not the prompts a user typed. Our page on seeing which queries Copilot used covers this view in detail.

For a full walkthrough of the report, see free Copilot citation data in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

5. In Search Console, open the generative AI performance report.
6. Switch to the Pages dimension and sort by impressions. Those are the URLs Google showed in its AI features.
7. Treat any trend from mid-August 2026 with care. Google confirmed a bug that depressed impressions in this report from roughly 12 to 13 August 2026.

ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude

8. Write five to ten questions your buyers actually ask.
9. Ask each one in each engine, logged out or with memory off. OpenAI says ChatGPT may use saved memories when it rewrites a search query, which makes logged-in results hard to reproduce.
10. Record in a spreadsheet: date, engine, question, whether sources were shown, every cited URL, and which of them are yours.
11. Repeat monthly on the same questions. OpenAI doesn't offer a per-site report, as covered in whether OpenAI shows how often ChatGPT cites you, so your log is the record.

Put the three sources side by side, one column per engine and one row per page. Then look for patterns.

• A page cited in one engine and absent in another. That's normal. In Otterly's 2,000 AI blogs experiment, Copilot produced 2,718 of 3,934 tracked citations for one site while ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode almost never cited it. Don't average across engines.
• A blog post cited instead of your product page. This is common, and why AI cites your blog post instead of your product page explains the usual reasons.
• Few or none of your pages cited. Check eligibility first. Google states a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A stray noindex or nosnippet removes you, and the free noindex, nosnippet and data-nosnippet check finds it.
• Third-party pages cited where yours should be. The route in is being named on those pages. Start with finding the third-party pages AI engines cite.

Engines retrieve more sources than they show. OpenAI's search API returns the full list of URLs the model consulted separately from the citations, and OpenAI notes the number of sources is often greater than the number of citations. Your page can inform an answer and never appear as a link.

The gap isn't random either. A 2026 mechanistic study of how language models cite (arXiv:2606.28358) repaired over 90% of missed citations by amplifying specific attention heads, without changing the sources. Citation output is partly separate from which sources the model drew on.

Engines also cite different units. Anthropic cites short text spans, while Perplexity cites whole sources by number, which whether AI cites whole pages or sentences explains. A citation count from one engine isn't comparable to a count from another.

What this means: treat citations as a floor on your presence, not a measure of influence.

• Samples, not census. Your manual log covers only the questions you ask. In Otterly's experiment, Microsoft's own report counted 42,817 citations for one site against 3,934 logged by a prompt tracker. The windows may not match, but any prompt sample sees less than the engine's own count.
• No position data. Search Console reports AI impressions only. There is no rank inside an AI answer to check.
• Bing's grounding queries are sampled. Microsoft labels that metric a sample of overall citation activity.
• Retrieval is per query. Engines decide when to search. An answer without visible sources may come from the model's training data, which you can't influence this quarter.
• No outcome promise. Fixing access and eligibility removes blocks. It doesn't control what the models choose to cite.

The manual log is the slowest part. The free checker on this site runs up to three buyer questions (your own, or ones written from your homepage) and scores the answers with the 99Visibility score. It's a snapshot, not continuous tracking, so keep your Bing and Search Console exports alongside it for the engines it doesn't cover.

Whichever method you use, record the date. Engine behavior changes, and a citation report without a date can't be compared with next month's.

Is there a free report that shows every AI engine citing my pages? No. As of October 2026, no single free report covers all engines. Bing Webmaster Tools reports citations for Copilot, Bing AI summaries and select partners. Search Console reports impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude publish no per-site citation report, so you need a manual log for those engines.

Does Search Console show clicks from AI Overviews? No. Google's generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions only, broken down by page, country, date and device. It has no clicks, no click-through rate and no position. You can see which pages Google showed in AI Overviews and AI Mode, but not whether those appearances sent traffic.

Can Bing's report show which competitors get cited? No. Microsoft describes Citation Share as an observational metric, not a competitive scoreboard. It doesn't expose competitor domains. To see who else gets cited for your topics, ask the questions yourself and log every cited URL, including the ones that aren't yours.

Why would AI use my page without citing it? Engines retrieve a larger set of sources than they display. OpenAI's API returns consulted sources separately from citations, and the consulted list is often longer. Research on how models cite also shows citation output can be changed without changing the sources. A missing citation doesn't prove your page went unread.

Will adding schema get more of my pages cited? The evidence doesn't support that. Google says structured data isn't required for generative AI search. Ahrefs' matched-control study of 1,885 pages found no major uplift on any platform after adding schema, and AI Overviews citations fell 4.6%. Existing markup does no harm, but it isn't a citation lever.