AgentFound Standard · A unit of measurement
Earned Agent Citation
Earned Agent Citation (EAC) is the rate at which AI assistants name, cite, or recommend a business when answering a buyer's question, scored 0 to 100 and measured against others in the same category.
Why the metric exists
Search returned a list of links. AI assistants return an answer. EAC measures whether a business is included in that answer, not just whether it appears somewhere in a ranked search result.
A site can rank in traditional search and still score zero in EAC if assistants do not name, cite, or recommend it when buyers ask who to book, hire, visit, or trust.
What EAC measures
Recommended, cited, or mentioned in the answer.
Findability, citation confidence, answerability, authority support, structured data, profile consistency, action path, crawler access, and freshness.
How to read an EAC score
Assistants rarely name you. Rivals own the answer.
You appear, but inconsistently across prompts.
You are a default answer in your category.
Method principles
The score leans hardest on what an assistant actually said.
Every remeasurement runs the same stored prompts.
Each score is stamped with the methodology version used.
Canonical facts
- Is EAC the same as an SEO ranking?
- No. A ranking is position in a list of links. EAC is whether an assistant names a business in its answer.
- What changes an EAC score?
- Original data others cite, third-party validation, clear machine-readable facts, and consistent identity across trusted sources.
- Who computes EAC?
- AgentFound, from stored, re-runnable measurements taken across major AI assistants.
Cite this definition
Earned Agent Citation (EAC) is the rate at which AI assistants name, cite, or recommend a business when answering a buyer's question, scored 0-100 against its category.
AgentFound EAC Standard v1.0 · Ref a9bd63ee · Issued June 2026
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