> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://promptwatch.com/docs/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Self-citation rate > Self-citation rate is the share of citations in AI answers that point at your own domain, showing whether models build answers from your content or from what others write about you. ### What is the self-citation rate? The self-citation rate is the share of all citations in your tracked AI answers that point at your own domain, rather than third-party pages. If answers to your prompts produce 400 citations in a period and 60 of them point at your site, your self-citation rate is 15%. A self-citation is a cited URL whose domain matches your project's brand domain. In Citations, that domain is always in the list, and its share of all citations is the rate. A subdomain such as "docs.yourbrand.com" appears as its own domain, and a review site's page about you does not count. ### Why the metric exists Citations tell you which content AI models trust. Self-citations tell you whether that trusted content is yours. The distinction decides who controls your narrative: * **High self-citation rate**: models answer questions about your category using your own pages. You control the facts, the framing, and the freshness, because updating your site updates the source. * **Low self-citation rate**: answers are assembled from review sites, comparison articles, Reddit threads, and news coverage. The information may still be favorable, but someone else wrote it, and correcting it means influencing pages you don't own. That is [offsite mentions](/docs/academy/offsite-mentions) territory. Neither extreme is a goal in itself. Models deliberately mix sources, and a rate near 100% would just mean nobody else writes about you. The useful signals are the trend, and the split: rising self-citations while total citations grow means your content strategy is landing. ### How to read it Read the rate together with its two components before acting: * **Rate up, total citations flat**: your pages are displacing third-party sources. Good sign for content authority. * **Rate down, total citations up**: third-party coverage is growing faster than your own. Not necessarily bad, but check what those new sources say about you. * **Rate near zero with real citation volume**: models use plenty of sources for your prompts, just never yours. That usually points at content or crawlability, not reputation. Also expect structural differences by prompt type: branded prompts ("YourBrand pricing") self-cite heavily, category prompts ("best CRM for startups") mostly cite third parties. A shift in your prompt mix moves the blended rate without anything changing in the market, so filter by prompt type before reading a trend. ### What moves it * **Publishing content that answers your tracked prompts**: models cite pages that directly answer the question asked. The [Content Gap](/docs/academy/content-gap) report scores how well your sitemap pages cover each tracked prompt, so you can see which questions have no matching page. * **Crawlability**: models can only cite what their bots can fetch. If citation crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, or Perplexity-User can't reach your pages, third parties get the citation by default. Check [crawlability](/docs/academy/crawlability) and your [crawler logs](/docs/academy/ai-crawler-insights). * **Freshness**: cited pages get displaced when a fresher source appears. Keeping high-value pages current protects the self-citations you already earned. ### Where to find it Open **Citations** in the sidebar. The citations chart always includes your own domain in the domain list, even when it wouldn't make the top domains on citation count, and shows each domain's share of all citations for the period. Your domain's share is your self-citation rate, and the chart tracks how your citation count develops over time next to the third-party domains that dominate your answers. The Promptwatch Citations chart with homestra.com in the domain list and its percentage share of all citations. Filter by AI model to find where the rate diverges: it is common for your own pages to feed one platform's answers while another platform relies entirely on third-party sources. For where in the source list those self-citations land, see [Citation rank](/docs/academy/citation-rank); for the difference between being cited and being talked about, see [Citations vs. mentions](/docs/academy/citations-vs-mentions).