How do you know AI cites you?

Look at three kinds of evidence together. First, citation counts reported by platforms. The figures published in this book record Copilot citations of the IDAEO platform. Since Jul 22, the total is 31,700 citations. Second, regularly ask multiple AI services questions to check mentions and answer accuracy. Third, records of source lists for individual cases. TK Lin's personal IDA had 0 AI citations on its launch day, Sep 20. On Oct 3, testing covered 100 questions and five AI models. This IDA appeared in AI search source lists at a rate of 84%. The 0 is a citation count; 84% is the share of source lists in which it appeared. The units differ, so they cannot be compared directly. This is a single case and cannot be generalized to merchants. There is another signal: first-party records show AI real-time reads totaling 651,000. These are reads, not necessarily citations. Citations occur inside AI Platforms, and these records provide different kinds of evidence. See Figure 3-6, “How Do We Know AI Cited Us?”, for an overview. Also see Figure 3-2, “Content Journey Map and the AI Black Box,” and Figure 3-5, “Microsoft.”