When an AI assistant searches the web before answering, the pages it cites strongly influence which products it recommends. If the three comparison articles it relies on all list your competitors and never mention you, it is unlikely to name you either. Citation gap analysis maps these sources for your category and shows where your SaaS is missing from them — while being careful never to call something a gap that has not been verified.
Every citation, normalized
Narrashift stores the sources returned with every answer and normalizes them to the publisher domain. Redirect links are resolved to the real source: Gemini, for example, cites through vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com links and names the real domain separately, so Narrashift attributes those citations to the actual publisher instead of counting Google's redirect as a source.
The citations dashboard lists the most cited domains with the number of answers, how many of those answers named competitors, how many named you, the providers that cited them and when they were last observed. Each domain gets an estimated category — product documentation, comparison or industry blog, news publication, community discussion, product directory or reviews, research report, or brand website — clearly marked as an estimate based on the domain. A trend chart shows how citations of the top sources change week by week.
Verified gaps versus potential opportunities
A citation gap in Narrashift has a strict definition. A source must have been cited in a monitored AI answer, that answer must have named at least one competitor and not your brand, and the cited page itself must name a competitor but not you. To check the last condition, Narrashift fetches the cited page — respecting the publisher's robots.txt — and looks for your brand and competitor names and aliases.
Only when all conditions are met is a citation marked as a verified gap. If the page has not been checked yet, could not be fetched or is blocked by robots.txt, it is shown as a potential source opportunity instead. Pages that turn out to mention you are marked accordingly. This distinction prevents the most common mistake in citation analysis: assuming that a source leaves you out simply because an answer did.
What to do with a gap
Every gap links to the answer it came from and the question that triggered it, so you understand the context before acting. The suggested action is to evaluate whether the publication is a relevant target for authentic editorial inclusion or a genuine product review: confirm that it covers your category, check whether it accepts submissions or corrections, and prepare factual material for the editor.
Narrashift never recommends buying links, posting fake reviews or mass outreach. Outreach is something your team decides on and performs; the platform records the outcome so you can later see whether the source and the AI answers changed.
Connected to opportunities
Citation gaps also appear inside Opportunity finder, grouped by topic. Only domains cited repeatedly for a topic are included, because a single citation is too weak to justify outreach. Verified checks raise confidence; unchecked sources keep the opportunity at low confidence until the pages are checked. You can trigger page checks from the citations dashboard at any time, and they also run automatically after monitoring cycles.