AI citations are the named sources an AI credits when it gives an answer, the short list of websites a tool like Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews links to as where its reply came from. Being one of those named sources is, roughly, the AI-era version of ranking on the first page.
For a small business, this reframes what visibility means. When an answer engine writes a paragraph instead of listing links, the sources it cites are the businesses a customer actually sees, and the rest are invisible to that person. Whether you are cited is earned mostly off your site, through real authority, reviews, and mentions, the same things behind E-E-A-T; a clean website does not buy a citation.
What a website can do is make sure the AI can read and quote you correctly when the off-site signals are there. An AI can only cite a business whose pages it can read, so I keep your facts legible and unambiguous. Being readable is the floor for being cited, not a promise of it, one part of the wider generative engine optimization picture.