AI Sources & Destinations: What AI Reads vs What It Visits
The AI Sources & Destinations panel shows which websites AI consults before answering about your market, and which pages it actually visits. Learn the two tabs, the badges, and the per-domain drill.
Before an AI assistant answers a question about your market, it does research: it runs web searches, reads results, and opens pages. The AI Sources & Destinations panel makes that research visible — and it usually holds the biggest surprise on the whole dashboard: most of what AI reads about you is not your website. Community threads, review sites, retailers, and sometimes a competitor’s site often outrank your own domain in the AI’s reading list.
Consulted sources vs. Visited pages
The panel has two tabs, and the distinction matters:
Consulted sources
The search results the AI read while answering — its research diet. Includes each domain’s citation count, how many prompts it appeared for, and its average rank in those searches (AVG. POS.).
Visited pages
The pages the AI actually opened while researching — a stronger signal of what its answer is built on, and the closest measurable proxy to “where AI sends its attention”. The share bar shows the same source-type mix as the Consulted tab, computed over visits.
Like every drilldown, both tabs read the latest run per prompt and model within your selected time range, and both respect the model filter. Click any domain row to see the exact pages and the prompts where it appeared — down to the full AI answer.
What the badges mean
- You — the domain belongs to your project (your main domain, its aliases, or a configured owned channel).
- Pinned — a competitor or retailer you pinned in the ranking, so you can spot them at a glance.
- Type badges (Retail, Editorial, Community, Brand sites, Reference) — automatic classification of each domain, so the share bar can tell you things like “a third of what AI reads in your market is retail, a tenth is community”. New domains are classified shortly after they first appear; until then a domain may show without a type.
- Gemini redirect (unresolved) — on older data you may see the domain
vertexaisearch.cloud.google.comwith this badge. Google wraps Gemini’s sources in short-lived redirect links; we resolve them to the real website at collection time, but links from before this resolution existed can no longer be unwrapped. The badge marks them honestly instead of counting them as a real website.
Google AI Overview caveat: AI Overview does not expose which pages it browsed, so it contributes to Consulted sources but not to Visited pages.
The per-domain drill: which pages win
Clicking a domain on the Consulted tab opens its page list: every URL the AI read from that domain, with title, how often, and its best search position — grouped into page types (Support, Product pages, Buying guides, Editorial, Community). This is where the panel turns into a content brief: if a competitor’s spare-parts and support pages are what AI keeps reading, that tells you exactly which kind of page earns consultations in your category.
Three questions worth asking every month:
- Is my own domain in the top consulted sources for my own category — and with which pages?
- Which third-party sites does AI trust here, and is my brand present and correctly described on them?
- Did any new domain enter the list — a new review site, community, or competitor content hub?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Reddit (or YouTube) my top consulted source?
Because AI assistants weight community discussion heavily for product and comparison questions — across most markets we track, community platforms are among the most-read sources. That is not a bug; it is a strategy signal: the conversations there shape what AI says about you.
A domain is misclassified. Can it be fixed?
Yes — classifications are stored per domain and can be corrected by our team. Contact support with the domain and the type you would expect.
Why does the share bar say “share of top sources”?
The mix is computed over the ranked domains shown in the table (the top of the list), not over every long-tail domain that appeared once. It is a faithful picture of what dominates AI’s reading, stated precisely.
My own site has a low share of Visited pages. Is that bad?
It is normal — and it is the core GEO lesson: AI answers are mostly built from third parties. Improve it from both sides: make your own pages more citable (structured data, clear product pages, llms.txt) and be present on the third-party sources AI already reads.
See What AI Reads About You
Open the AI Sources & Destinations panel on your Citation Analytics page and check whether your site is even on the reading list.
Go to Dashboard