Stat cards
Read them left to right. AIO Triggered against Total Keywords is your exposure — how much of your keyword set now returns an AI answer. Citation Rate is your performance within that exposure.
Both matter, and they move independently. Exposure rising while citation rate holds means AI answers are spreading through your market and you’re keeping pace. Exposure rising while citation rate falls means you’re losing ground.
The table
Expanding a row lists the Referenced Sources — the actual sources the AI Overview drew on.
Reading it
Rows where you rank well but aren’t cited are the priority. Ranking third while an AI Overview above you cites three other sites means the answer is being given without you, and your position is worth less traffic than it looks. These are also the most winnable: you already have the authority, so the problem is usually that the page doesn’t answer the question directly enough to be extracted. Rows where you’re cited but rank poorly are the opposite and are good news. AI Overviews don’t simply reproduce the top results — a clear answer can be cited from well down the page. The References count tells you how contested the answer is. An overview citing two sources is nearly winner-take-all; one citing eight has room. Referenced Sources is where the actionable detail is. Open a few rows for keywords you care about and look at what’s being cited — often industry publications, documentation, or comparison sites rather than vendors. Getting mentioned on those sources can matter more than editing your own page.Improving citation
Common patterns among cited pages:- The question is answered directly and early, not after several paragraphs of preamble
- The phrasing matches how people ask, not internal terminology
- Facts are stated plainly enough to be quoted in isolation
- Structure — headings, lists, tables — makes the relevant passage easy to locate