Your own website may be splitting its own citations
A brand we measured runs two websites — a .com and a .ca. In answers about that brand, the two were cited 45 and 28 times. Counted separately, they ranked second and fourth. Counted together, they led every other source including the retailer above them.
The mechanism
Most brands with international operations run country domains. To the brand they are one website with two front doors. To an assistant assembling an answer they are two separate sources, each accumulating its own authority, neither reaching the weight the two would carry combined.
Nobody sees it, because nobody looks at their own citation table. Analytics report traffic to properties you own; they do not report how a machine counts them.
And the same panel answers the question both ways
Asked whether the brand's own site was the leading source about it, the category-wide table said no — eighth place, well behind a specialty retailer. Scoped to answers actually naming the brand, and counting both domains, the answer was yes.
Same data, same day, opposite conclusions — depending entirely on which population you compute over.
That is worth more than the finding. If you are being shown a citation table, the first question is what it was computed across. A category-wide table cannot answer a question about one brand, and the two come out of the same file — which is exactly why it is easy to miss.
What to check
Whether you run more than one domain, whether both are cited, and whether anyone has counted them together.
Measured July 2026 across four assistants, three runs per question. Brand and category not named. Read the methodology →