Is Citations Equal Traffic?

It is reasonable to assume that people are clicking through your site because your page gets cited in a Copilot answer. Not exactly.

Citations and traffic are related, but they’re not the same thing, and confusing the two can lead you to some pretty wrong conclusions about how your content is actually performing.

Let’s break down what citations actually measure, where traffic fits into the picture, and why the gap between the two matters more than most people realise.

What a Citation actually is

When Copilot generates an answer, it sometimes pulls information from specific web pages and credits them as sources. That credit is called a citation: your page gets logged in Bing’s AI Performance report as having contributed to an AI-generated response.

However, the user who triggered that Copilot answer may have gotten everything they needed right there in the response. They read the summary, got their answer, and moved on. They never clicked your link. So your page was cited, but you got zero traffic from it.

This is the fundamental difference between citations and traffic. A citation means your content was used. Traffic means someone actually visited your site. Those two things don’t always happen together.

Why People Click Through (and Why They Don’t)

Whether a citation leads to a click depends a lot on the type of query. Some questions have simple, self-contained answers. Someone asks, “What year was the Eiffel Tower built?” and Copilot tells them 1889. Done. There’s no reason to visit a webpage for that. Citations might be generated, but clicks almost certainly won’t follow.

On the other hand, if someone asks, “How do I fix a leaking radiator valve?” That’s a task with steps involved. The AI answer might give them an overview, but a motivated user is much more likely to click through to a detailed guide they can follow along with. Here, citations and traffic are much more likely to occur together.

The gap between citation and click is widest for informational queries, where the AI can give a complete answer in one go. It’s narrowest for complex, how-to, or research-heavy queries where users naturally want more depth than a summary can provide.

What Your AI Performance Report Is Actually Showing You

Bing Webmaster Tools tracks two separate things in the AI Performance section: citations (how often your pages were referenced in Copilot answers) and clicks (how often users actually followed a link to your site from those answers). You’ll want to look at both, and you’ll want to look at them separately.

A page with lots of citations but very few clicks isn’t necessarily failing. It might be doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — helping Bing’s AI give better answers — while just not being the kind of content that drives people to click through. That’s worth knowing, because it changes how you think about the value of that page.

Conversely, a page with a high click-through rate from AI citations is punching well above its weight. It’s being used by the AI, and it’s converting that exposure into actual visits. That’s a page worth doubling down on.

Citation Rate vs Click-Through Rate

It helps to think about these as two different metrics with two different jobs. Citation rate tells you about your content’s authority and relevance in the eyes of Bing’s AI. It’s a signal that your content is being found useful. Click-through rate tells you about user intent — whether the people reading the AI’s answer actually wanted more than the AI could give them.

A high citation rate with a low click-through rate usually means one of two things: either the AI is giving such a complete answer that users don’t need to visit your page, or the way your content is surfaced in the citation doesn’t give users enough of a hook to want to click. Neither of these is catastrophic, but they point to different things you might want to address.

A low citation rate with a high click-through rate is rarer, but it tells you that when users do see your content referenced, they’re genuinely interested. The challenge there is getting cited more often in the first place.

Does Traffic Even Matter If You’re Getting Citations?

This is a question worth asking. For a lot of businesses, traffic is the point. More visitors mean more leads, more sales, and more ad impressions. In that case, citations without clicks are nice for brand visibility, but they don’t drive revenue.

For some brands, simply being referenced by an AI assistant as a credible source has real value even without a click. If Copilot tells someone “according to [your brand], here’s how this works” — that’s a brand impression. It builds familiarity. It positions you as an authority. Users might not click today, but they might remember your name when they’re ready to buy.

What matters is that you’re clear on what you’re optimising for, so you’re not looking at citation data and feeling great when the traffic that actually matters isn’t moving.

How to Get More Clicks From Your Citations

If you’re already getting cited and you want to improve the click-through side of the equation, a few things tend to help:

• Target queries where users need more than a quick answer. They include how-to content, in-depth comparisons, and research-heavy topics, which naturally draw more clicks

• Make sure your page title and meta description signal that there’s more depth available. Users are more likely to click if they sense the page has more to offer than the AI summary

• Build content that answers a question and then naturally leads to the next one. If your page is part of a journey rather than a final destination, users have more reason to visit

• Keep an eye on which specific pages have the best citation-to-click ratio in Bing Webmaster Tools and use them as a template for what’s working

At Embarque, we track both citations and clicks for our clients because each one tells a different part of the story. Citations show you where you’re earning credibility with AI systems. Clicks show you where that credibility is actually translating into an audience. You need both data points to understand what’s really going on.

Takeaway

Citations and traffic are not the same, and confusing them will distort how you evaluate performance.

Citations show that Bing’s AI considers your content useful enough to reference. Traffic shows that users wanted more than the AI summary and chose to visit your site.

Both metrics matter. Both are worth tracking. But the relationship between them changes depending on your content type and the kinds of queries bringing visibility.

Understand what each metric actually measures, and you’ll make far better decisions based on the data.