When an engine backs its answer with the web, it shows its working: the pages it read. brandflare keeps every one. Sources turns them into the most practical list in the product: which websites feed the answers in your category, which of them mention you, which of your own pages AI reads, and where outreach would pay.
Sources has three tabs: Most cited, Your pages and Outreach opportunities. It opens with the media mix.
The media mix
The top of Sources splits everything AI read about your category into four kinds of site:
| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Owned | Your own website and anything under it |
| Earned | Coverage you've won: press, blogs, comparison articles, anything independent |
| Social | Communities and reviews: forums, Reddit, review platforms |
| Paid | Marketplaces and listings |
Each shows its share of citations, the number of citations, how many of those landed on answers that named you, and its biggest sites.
Owned is recognised from your website. Social and paid come from lists brandflare maintains, so a site that hasn't been classified counts as earned.
The mix tells you what kind of work is feeding the answers. A brand whose citations are nearly all owned is talking to itself: engines give independent voices more weight than self-description, which is the whole argument for digital PR. A brand with healthy earned coverage and nothing owned has the opposite gap: when AI wants the facts, there's no page of yours to read.
Most cited
A table of the websites the engines cited, each with its logo and type, how many times it was cited, how many of those answers named you, and which engines cited it.
Open any website to see which of its pages were cited: the exact article, thread or listing AI is reading, not only the site. That's the difference between "G2 matters" and "this one comparison page is where three engines get their shortlist".
Your pages
The pages of your own site that AI cited in the last 30 days: how many times, by which engines, and what the questions were about. Open a page to see the questions that led AI to it, and select one to read the answer.
This is the closest thing to a rank report that AI search has. Pages that appear here are doing work: keep them accurate and current, because they're what the engines quote. Pages you'd expect to see and don't are the gap. If AI isn't citing your site at all, the tab says so plainly, and the fix usually starts with pages that answer your tracked questions directly (content strategy for AI search).
Your pages pairs naturally with AI Crawlers. Crawlers shows which pages AI bots read; Your pages shows which pages AI used.
Outreach opportunities
Two lists, both built from your own answers:
- Cited often, rarely names you. Sites the engines lean on in your category whose cited pages mostly leave you out. You're close: the site is already part of the conversation, and the work is getting onto the page.
- Never names you. Sites cited in your category where you don't appear at all.
Each is a target with evidence attached. "This roundup was cited eleven times across four engines on questions we care about, and we're not in it" is a better brief for a PR team than any list of high-authority domains.
Why only some answers have sources
Engines cite when they search. Google Search and Perplexity ground nearly every answer in live web results and show their sources; ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude often answer from what the model already learned, with nothing to cite. So Sources is weighted towards the engines that retrieve, which is fine, because those are the engines where changing a page changes the answer within weeks rather than at the next model release. The mechanics are in how AI engines recommend brands.
Where sources show up elsewhere
- Every answer you open lists the websites it used.
- Alerts can tell you when a site AI cites about you appears or disappears.
- Recommendations of the Sources type come from this data.
- Export Report includes the sites the answers cite and the pages of your own site among them.
- Tracing a false claim to the page that started it begins here.