AI Citation Checker

Follow the reference

A source appearing beside an AI answer is useful evidence, but it leaves a question: what part of the answer is that source attached to? A citation after a paragraph may cover one sentence, several claims, or something less clear. Counting the domain alone loses that context.

This checker keeps the passage, reference ID and source URL together. It works with answers you supply from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google or another product. It does not ask those products a fresh question. An answer captured last week remains last week’s evidence, even when you review it today.

Paste a Markdown export with its links and footnotes, or upload a structured capture containing answer blocks and their reference IDs. Keep the platform, prompt, capture time and collection source. The example provides the expected JSON format and is clearly labeled as invented data.

A link is not always a citation

The report separates five kinds of evidence. A mapped citation connects an answer passage with an explicit reference. An ordinary answer link has a destination but no confirmed citation role. A reference-list-only source appears in the supplied list without a passage mapping. A retrieved-only source was supplied as retrieval context, not as a citation. An unmapped marker has no usable reference behind it.

Markdown footnotes provide an explicit mapping. An ordinary Markdown link, including a reference-style link, remains an answer link. Code examples, image URLs and raw HTML are not treated as citation evidence. An unexplained marker such as [7] stays uncertain rather than being assigned to the seventh URL in a list.

That distinction matters when comparing websites. Three references to one article are three citation occurrences, not three different cited pages. The report shows both numbers and deduplicates repeated appearances within each capture when counting captures that cite a hostname. Reference-only and retrieved-only entries do not inflate those citation totals.

Read the passage

Open a citation in the evidence report and read its surrounding passage. Then open the source. Does it contain the information the answer attributes to it? Is the answer using an old version, skipping an important condition or turning a narrow finding into a general claim? Those are editorial questions, not questions a working URL can settle.

For quoted wording, add the source URL, the quote and text copied from that source. Record where and when you collected the text. The checker compares exact wording after normalizing Unicode and whitespace. Capitalization and punctuation still matter. A match means the wording appears in the supplied text; it does not establish that the claim is accurate or that the quotation is used fairly.

A missing match needs care too. You may have copied only part of the article, encountered a paywall or captured a page before its text loaded. Read the original before treating a missing match as a fabricated quote. This tool deliberately does not produce a hallucination score or a citation-accuracy percentage.

Check the destination

The optional HTTP status check follows the selected source’s redirects and records the final response. It sends a HEAD request, so it does not download and analyze the full article. A server can reject HEAD while allowing an ordinary browser visit. A successful response establishes reachability at that time, not indexation, factual support or editorial quality.

Original citation URLs remain in the report. Page grouping removes fragments such as #section but preserves query strings, HTTP versus HTTPS and hostname differences. A tracking URL therefore does not silently become its destination in the citation totals. The separate Redirect Checker can help inspect a longer chain.

Use the findings

For your own pages, start with the passages being cited. They reveal what an answer actually uses: perhaps a definition, a comparison, a practical example or a specific measurement. Make that material clear and maintain the underlying evidence. Keep qualifications close to the claims they limit. Do not rewrite an entire page just to repeat phrases from one AI answer.

Compare captures made under similar conditions and retain their dates. A single answer is not a census of a platform’s sources, and one missing citation does not prove that a website has lost visibility. JSON downloads retain the full captured passages; CSV uses passage excerpts of up to 4,000 characters. For broader brand and domain comparisons, use the AI Visibility Checker. For captured Google search Overviews, use the Google AI Overview Checker.

These distinctions also appear in Ahrefs’ AI visibility metric definitions, which separate cited material from found or retrieved material. Markdown is parsed with the maintained League CommonMark parser; the report adds source-role handling, passage mapping and capture provenance around that foundation.