Citations & Source Opportunities

Citations & Source Opportunities is where you see which URLs AI platforms actually pulled from when answering your prompts, and where Surfais turns that into a ranked list of domains worth pursuing next. It’s split into two halves: Citations, what’s already happened, and Source Opportunities, what to do about it.

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Citations

Every citation is a source URL an AI platform used or linked to in a response where your brand was mentioned. Like the Mentions feed, citations are grouped by prompt and organised into recency sections — Last 30 days, Previous 30 days, and Older — with four summary cards up top: total citations for the last 30 days, unique domains cited, platforms involved, and the number of unique prompts that produced a citation. Expand a prompt to see every domain cited for it, broken down by country. Expand a specific source to open the response drawer with the citation highlighted in the AI’s actual text, so you can see exactly where and how it was used. The Branded / Non-branded filter from Prompts is also available here, narrowing the citation list and summary cards to prompts matching that slice.

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Own vs competitor vs third-party sources

Every cited domain is classified by what kind of source it is, shown as a coloured pill next to the domain name: A fifth category, Other, catches domains that don’t cleanly fit the four above. Each type implies a different way to earn a citation there: owned means better content on your own pages, editorial means PR coverage, UGC means genuine reviews, reference means accurate entity data on the sites AI treats as authoritative.

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Source Opportunities

Below the citations list sits a second, distinct table: Source Opportunities. This isn’t about citations you’ve already earned — it’s a ranked list of domains AI platforms are already pulling from when answering questions in your category, where you don’t yet have a foothold. Each row is a domain, its source type, and an opportunity score shown as one to three stars:

• ★★★ High priority — pulled from often, with a large gap between your presence there and your competitors’. The highest-impact places to focus first.
• ★★☆ Medium priority — a real opportunity, with either lower retrieval frequency or a smaller competitive gap than the tier above.
• ★☆☆ Low priority — worth knowing about, but a smaller incremental gain.

Each row also shows an Own / Competitor count — how many times your content versus your tracked competitors’ content has been retrieved from that domain — so you can see whether you’re already present there or starting from zero. Use the type filter to focus on one kind of opportunity at a time, and the three priority tiles above the table to see the overall shape of your opportunity list first.

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Acting on an opportunity

Acting on a source opportunity means earning a presence on a domain AI platforms already trust for your category, so the next scan has a better chance of citing you there too. Start with the ★★★ tier, then match the action to the type: Owned means publishing content that better answers the prompts surfacing that domain; Editorial means pitching press coverage; UGC means encouraging genuine reviews; Reference means correcting your entity’s listing on that source. Once you’ve earned a presence, watch the Own / Competitor count on subsequent scans — a domain moving from zero own retrievals to some is the signal it worked.

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