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Help Center›Tracking Citations›What do Won, Lost, Held, and New mean

What do Won, Lost, Held, and New mean?

Last updated: July 4, 2026Tracking Citations
Quick answer

They are citation states between scans: Won means you gained a citation you did not have, Held means you kept one, Lost means a citation disappeared, and New means the prompt entered tracking for the first time.

A single scan tells you where you stand; two scans tell you where you are heading. These four states are how Citably describes the movement, per prompt and per engine, every time a new scan lands.

Won is a prompt that flipped from Not cited to Cited: your best news, especially when it follows a deployment aimed at that prompt. Held is a citation present in both scans, the quiet backbone of durable visibility. Lost is a citation that was there and now is not. New simply marks a prompt’s first scan, when there is no history to compare against yet.

Read them in ratios rather than one at a time. A high Held ratio means your citations are stable, which is exactly what the Citation Health Index rewards. Wins concentrated on prompts you recently deployed against mean the loop is working. Losses need triage, and the honest rule is that one Lost is a flicker, repeated Lost is a trend.

Because AI answers are generated fresh each run, some churn is permanent background noise: a Won here and a Lost there on the same scan usually cancel out. What deserves your attention is the pattern across several scans, and that is exactly what these states make visible.

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