Track the sources behind answer-engine citations
Answer engines like Perplexity attach a source to nearly every sentence they write. PuffinScout watches which sources earn that attachment in your category, and whether one of them is yours.
The answer-engine pattern
Perplexity popularised a format where nearly every sentence in an answer carries a small citation pointing at the page it came from, rather than one list of links at the bottom. That pattern has since spread to other AI search engines, so a page that earns a citation in one place tends to be the kind of page that earns one elsewhere: specific, directly answering the question asked, and easy for a retrieval system to quote cleanly.
Ranking the sources, not just counting them
PuffinScout does not stop at "was I cited." For every tracked question it lists every source the answer drew from, ranked by how often each one shows up across your whole set of questions, so you can see the handful of pages that keep getting picked, not just the one answer in front of you. This is monitored across major AI search engines, including the answer-engine citation format, never simulated with a brand name swapped in.
Why the source matters more than the answer
The written answer changes every time the question is asked again. The source behind it moves far more slowly: a page that earns a citation this week tends to hold it for weeks, because retrieval systems favour pages that keep answering the question cleanly. That is why the ranked list of sources, tracked over time, is worth more than reading any single answer once. It shows you what to become, not just what was said today.
Common questions
Why focus on the sources, not just the answer?
Because the source is what you can act on. An answer changes wording constantly; the pages it leans on are where a citation is actually won or lost, so we rank those and watch them move.
Do you just count citations?
No. We rank sources by how much of the answering they do across your questions, so a page cited in one throwaway line is not treated the same as one behind many answers.
Which brands show up in the source list?
Every brand named or linked inside a cited page, not only yours. That is how you spot a page that names a rival and leaves you out, which is the clearest place to act.
Find the sources shaping your category
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