How Yogoo measures AI citation

What we measure

Yogoo Score is one number — but it answers five questions about how AI assistants cite your brand.

Citation Hit Rate and Multi-engine breadth combine into the Yogoo Score itself, scaled 0–100. Share of Voice and Sentiment are reported alongside as peer signals — they answer different questions than the score does. The confidence band describes how much to trust the measurement.

A score of 67 with a band of ± 5 means: in your category, your brand shows up in AI answers reliably more often than most, less often than the leaders.

1. Citation Hit Rate

What it measures

The fraction of buyer-discovery queries in your category where AI assistants mention your brand in their answer.

How we compute it

For each category (e.g., "Project management"), we curate prompts that match what real buyers actually ask:

• Best project management tools for SaaS teams
• Linear vs. Asana vs. Jira
• Most-loved project management software in 2026

The full prompt set per category is shared with subscribers; the patterns are public — see Category coverage.

We run each prompt many times across each of the 5 engines, then count how often your brand appears in the response text — matched against your brand name, your domain, and any aliases you declare. When AI says "Linear" or "linear.app" or "Linear, Inc.", we count all of them. The Citation Hit Rate is the fraction of AI answers where your brand showed up.

Example

If linear.app shows up in roughly 4 out of every 10 AI answers for the "Project management" prompts, the Citation Hit Rate is 42%.

Why it matters

When a buyer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation in your category, your domain either appears in the answer — or it doesn't. Citation Hit Rate is the first-order measure of whether you're in the AI's consideration set at all.

A 0% Citation Hit Rate isn't an error. It's a diagnosis.

2. Share of Voice

What it measures

When AI assistants talk about brands in your category, what fraction of those mentions is yours.

How it differs from Citation Hit Rate

Both metrics use the same measurement data; they ask different questions:

• Citation Hit Rate — your fraction of all AI answers in the category. Answers: "How often does AI include me at all?"
• Share of Voice — your fraction of all brand mentions across those answers. Answers: "When AI talks about brands in my space, what's my share?"

The two converge when AI lists one brand per response. They diverge in dense-list topics — where AI lists 5 or 10 brands per response, your Citation Hit Rate stays high (you're in most lists) but your Share of Voice is lower (you're one of many).

Example

Across 100 typical AI answers about CRM, suppose AI cites:

• Salesforce in 50 answers
• HubSpot in 40
• Pipedrive in 30
• Your brand in 20
• Other long-tail brands accounting for 120 additional mentions (since AI lists multiple brands per answer)

Your Citation Hit Rate is 20 out of 100 answers = 20% — you appear in 1 of every 5 AI answers about CRM.

Your Share of Voice is 20 out of 260 total brand mentions = 7.7% — when AI talks about CRM brands, about 1 in every 13 mentions is yours.

Why both matter

Citation Hit Rate tells you whether you're in the conversation. Share of Voice tells you how much of the conversation you own. A brand can be in 80% of AI answers but only get 10% of brand-mention real estate, because AI is naming nine other brands alongside it. The two together give you a complete picture of competitive position.

Where you'll see it

Yogoo reports Citation Hit Rate as your headline number; Share of Voice powers the Most-cited brands ranking — that's where competitive share signal lives.

3. Sentiment

What it measures

How AI assistants talk about your brand when they mention it: favorably, neutrally, or critically. Citation rate and Share of Voice tell you whether AI is talking about you. Sentiment tells you what AI is saying.

How we compute it

For every AI answer that mentions your brand in our coverage, we classify the mention as positive, neutral, or negative. We aggregate across the category to give you an overall sentiment indicator: mostly positive, mixed, or mostly negative.

Example

Across the AI answers that cite linear.app for "Project management" prompts, suppose 78 of every 100 cited mentions are framed positively ("Linear is a great choice for fast-moving teams"), 18 are neutral ("Linear is among the options for project management"), and 4 are negative ("Linear may be limited for larger orgs"). The category-level indicator reads mostly positive.

What's in T1 vs. coming next

Available now (every tier, free included): category-level sentiment indicator.

Coming with our next release: per-engine sentiment breakdown (which engines frame you positively vs. critically); per-prompt sentiment with competitor deltas; sentiment by feature category (e.g., your sentiment on "data" vs. "pricing" vs. "integrations"). Tier breakdown at /pricing.

Why it matters

A high citation rate with negative sentiment is a different problem than a low citation rate. The first means AI knows you and is critical; the second means AI doesn't know you yet. Different prescriptions, different content priorities. Sentiment is the qualitative signal that makes the quantitative metrics actionable.

4. Multi-engine sampling

Why we sample 5 engines

Different AI engines train on different data, retrieve from different web indexes, and have different prompt-following behaviors. A brand strong in ChatGPT may be invisible in Gemini. A single-engine measurement misses most of the picture.

Yogoo samples all 5 of the engines that drive B2B SaaS buyer discovery today:

• Perplexity — pure retrieval-augmented; closest to "search 2.0"
• ChatGPT (gpt-4o, web tool enabled) — most-used by buyers
• Gemini (Pro, with Search) — Google's AI discovery surface
• Claude (Sonnet, with WebSearch) — fastest-growing in 2026
• Google AI Overviews (AIO) — embedded in Google Search; shapes default awareness for buyers who don't yet use a chatbot

How the breakdown is reported

The public widget shows the aggregate Citation Hit Rate across all 5 engines.

Subscribers see the per-engine breakdown — which engines cite you, which don't, and how the gap has trended over the last 30 days.

5. Confidence band

LLMs are stochastic

Run the same prompt against ChatGPT twice; you'll get two different answers. That isn't a bug — it's how LLMs work. They sample from a probability distribution every time they generate text.

Ask AI "best CRM" once and you might get Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. Ask again and you might get Salesforce, Attio, and Close.com. Both are true outputs.

A single AI answer is a coin flip. To estimate Citation Hit Rate, you need many flips.

How we report confidence

Yogoo samples many AI answers per category. From that sample we compute a 95% confidence interval — standard binomial-distribution math. The more samples, the tighter the band.

A score reported as 67 [62–72] means: we're 95% confident the true score sits between 62 and 72.

Category coverage at launch

Yogoo measures Citation Hit Rate within 30 categories. Categories are clusters of buyer-discovery prompts that map to how real buyers ask AI assistants for product recommendations.

The full prompt set within each category is shared with subscribers. We add new topics monthly when ≥5 people request the same one.

Don't see your category? Email me when my category is added →

What we don't measure

Yogoo measures whether AI assistants cite your domain in buyer-discovery queries. Here's what we don't:

• Cross-vertical credit. A brand strong in marketing automation doesn't get credit in CRM if buyers don't ask about it that way. Citation Hit Rate is bounded to the category you're measured in.
• Query bias. Some prompts skew toward incumbent brands ("best CRM" disproportionately cites Salesforce regardless of context, simply because Salesforce dominated CRM media for two decades). Bias-adjusted scores are a hard measurement problem; the score you see reflects raw citation, not bias-adjusted citation.

If you want a measurement we don't yet provide, tell us: contact@yogoo.ai