Retrieval & ranking
Selection Rate
How often an AI cites your page once it's already in the retrieved set.
Selection rate is how often an engine actually cites your page given that it was retrieved in the first place. It isolates the second gate of AI visibility: being fetched into the candidate set is one thing, being chosen from that set and attributed in the answer is another. A page can be retrieved constantly and selected rarely if its passages are weak.
Separating retrieval from selection is useful diagnostically. If you are rarely retrieved, the problem is corpus, crawlability or relevance. If you are retrieved but rarely selected, the problem is the passage itself — it is not quotable, specific or trustworthy enough to beat the other candidates.
Raising selection rate is the AEO craft: clearer answers, denser facts, cleaner extractable units, stronger entity signals on the page.
Related terms
Chunk Retrieval
Fetching the top few most relevant text passages from a vector index for a query.
Citation (AI)
When an AI answer attributes or links a specific page as its source.
Citation Readiness
How ready a page is to be quoted and attributed inside an AI answer.
Extractability
Whether a passage can be lifted into an AI answer and still stand on its own.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Fetch relevant documents first, then have an LLM write an answer grounded in them.
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