Citation Provenance Weighting

Citation Provenance Weighting is the practice of scoring every source that feeds an AI answer by how much control an agency has over it, then spending optimization effort in that order. Sources split into three tiers: owned assets (client site, docs, case studies), earned assets (earned media, review profiles, partner pages), and rented assets (Reddit threads, YouTube comments, third-party listicles). Rented sources move fastest but can be edited or deleted by strangers, so a client's AI visibility can drop without any change on the client's own site. Pallix maps exactly which sources shape AI recommendations, and Voxoria tracks how answer engines describe a brand across daily prompts, which makes tier drift visible before a retainer review. Agencies that rank sources by control before pitching AEO work avoid promising visibility they cannot defend, and they can show clients why a Reddit thread outranks the client's own pricing page in ChatGPT answers.