A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website — a directory, a trade body, a map service, a review site. Search engines use them to confirm that a business is real and located where it says, and inconsistency between them undermines that confirmation.
Citation building used to be sold by volume. Two hundred listings on directories nobody visits did little then and does nothing now. What matters is that the listings that are genuinely used and trusted are complete and agree with each other.
The ones that matter in the UK
| Why it matters | |
|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | The primary source — everything else should match it |
| Apple Business Connect | Powers Apple Maps and Siri on every iPhone |
| Bing Places | Feeds Bing, and through it several AI assistants |
| Your trade or professional body | Highly trusted and independently verified |
| Yell, Thomson Local, Scoot | Established UK directories that data aggregators draw from |
| Facebook and relevant sector sites | Widely used and frequently checked by customers |
Inconsistency is the real problem
The damage usually comes from small differences rather than missing listings. An old phone number on one directory. A previous address on another. The business name written three slightly different ways. A unit number included here and omitted there. Each is minor; together they make it harder for a search engine to be confident that all these references describe the same business.
Old addresses are the most common and most damaging, because a business that has moved often has listings pointing at the previous premises for years afterwards.
Duplicates
Duplicate listings — two entries for one business, often created automatically from old data — split reviews and signals between them and confuse customers. Finding and merging or removing them is often the highest-value part of the work.
Why this matters for AI search
AI assistants build their picture of a business from many sources at once. When those sources agree, the assistant states your details confidently; when they conflict, it may give an old address, a wrong number, or leave you out. Consistent citations are one of the more direct ways to influence what an assistant says. Our citation cleanup checklist covers the process in detail.