Sources, citations and crawlers

The pages AI answers draw on, gap analysis, content drafts and AI crawler logs.

• What are sources and why do they matter?

  Sources are the URLs an engine cited to build its answer. They are the clearest signal of what shapes your category, and usually most of them are not your own site. Changing what those pages say is often faster than changing your own.

• Why am I seeing sources I do not recognise?

  Because the engines read what they trust, not what you would choose. Forums, review sites and aggregators appear constantly. An unfamiliar domain in your list is information rather than an error: it is where your category is being decided.

• Why does source usage change?

  Engines that retrieve live pages at answer time cite different sources as the web changes. Movement across a week is meaningful; a single day's difference usually is not.

• What is gap analysis?

  Gap analysis lists the prompts where competitors are named and you are not, grouped by topic. It is the shortest path from a number to a task, because it tells you which question to go and win rather than just that a score is low.

• How do I use the Earned and Owned views?

  Earned covers what other sites say about you, which is where most AI visibility comes from. Owned covers signals on your own site. They are separated because the work is different: outreach on one side, technical and content fixes on the other.

• How do content drafts work?

  Content drafts start from gap analysis: the prompts you are missing from become the brief. Noma drafts a page aimed at that question, structured the way engines read, for your team to edit and publish. Nothing is published for you.

• How does agent analytics work?

  Agent analytics reads your server logs, not a script on the page, because AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. It names the AI agent behind each request, shows which pages it fetched, and separates crawlers learning your site from fetches made to answer a live question.