Citino teamWhat a source gap is
When AI assistants search the web to answer a question, they read other people’s pages: review sites, category directories, comparison articles, community threads, sometimes a competitor’s own comparison page. If those pages name your competitors and not you, the answer will too.
A source gap is one of those pages where you are missing, or present but described wrongly. Fixing it means changing that page, not your own site.
Step 1: Collect the sources behind the answers you lose
Start with the questions where you are named rarely or not at all.
- Run each question on each engine several times and keep the cited sources. Perplexity always shows them; ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews show them when they search.
- For each source, note the domain, the page, and whether it names you.
- Count how many of your lost answers each source appears in.
A page cited in 40 lost answers matters far more than one cited twice.
Step 2: Sort sources by what you can do about them
Not every source is open to you. Sorting them by what you can change turns a list into a plan:
| Source type | Examples | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Review and listing sites | Software review sites, marketplaces, app directories | Create or complete your listing; ask real customers for reviews |
| Editorial articles | “Best tools for…” roundups, comparison posts | Brief the writer with accurate facts; ask to be considered at the next update |
| Community threads | Forums, Reddit, Q&A sites | Join with a genuinely useful, disclosed answer; never astroturf |
| Your own pages | Product, pricing, docs, comparison pages | Edit them directly (see content gaps) |
| Competitor pages | A rival’s “us vs them” page | You cannot edit it; answer it with your own accurate comparison |
| Reference sources | Encyclopaedias, standards bodies, official registries | Correct factual errors through each site’s own process |
Step 3: Rank the work
For each source you can act on, estimate how much it should recover. A simple, honest way:
- How often it is cited for the questions you lose.
- How much a listing tends to help: being on a page cited in a winning answer matters most when the answer names only a few brands.
- How far behind you are on those questions: you cannot recover more than the gap.
Put the effort beside the estimate rather than folding it in. A small, certain win and a large, uncertain one are different decisions, and the person doing the work should see both. If there is too little evidence to estimate a gap, say so instead of ranking it as zero.
Step 4: Fix it properly
- Listings: fill in every field, with the same positioning, pricing and category you use on your own site. Engines look for agreement between sources.
- Corrections: when a page states something wrong about you, such as an old price or a missing integration, contact the publisher with the correct fact and a public source for it.
- Reviews: ask real customers. Never write, buy or incentivise fake reviews; it breaks platform rules and consumer-protection law in many countries.
- Communities: answer the actual question, disclose who you are, and link only where it helps.
Step 5: Check it worked
Mark the date each fix went live and measure the questions it targeted. Expect a lag: the page must be recrawled and then retrieved. Then compare your change with your competitors’ over the same days, so a model update that lifted everyone is not counted as your win. The method is in how to tell if a fix worked.
How Citino finds source gaps
Citino keeps every cited page from every answer, sorts sources by what you can change, and lists source gaps as work items ranked by the visibility each should recover, with effort shown beside it and a verdict once the fix is live.