Citation Flow
Also called: CF, Majestic Citation Flow
Citation Flow (CF) is a Majestic backlink metric scored 0 to 100 that predicts how influential a URL is based on the quantity of links pointing to it, regardless of their quality. It is one half of Majestic's Flow Metrics, paired with Trust Flow, which scores link quality.
Majestic launched Citation Flow and Trust Flow together on 14 May 2012 as a replacement for its older ACRank score. Citation Flow counts influence by volume: a page cited by thousands of URLs scores high even if every linking site is thin or spammy. Trust Flow starts from a manually reviewed seed of trusted sites and measures how that trust propagates through the link graph, so it approximates quality. Both run on a 0 to 100 logarithmic scale, which means climbing from 40 to 50 is far harder than going from 10 to 20.
Why the TF/CF ratio matters more than CF alone
The number most practitioners actually watch is the ratio of Trust Flow to Citation Flow. A profile with CF 45 / TF 8 signals links bought or scraped at scale; a healthier profile keeps Trust Flow within striking distance of Citation Flow. Majestic itself notes that most backlink profiles carry higher Citation Flow than Trust Flow, so a modest gap is normal but a collapsed one is a red flag.
One caveat worth stating plainly: Citation Flow is a vendor metric, not a Google ranking factor. Google has never confirmed using it. Treat CF as a directional proxy for how visible a domain is across the wider link map, useful for comparing prospects, not as a score Google reads. Read next to Trust Flow, CF 52 / TF 40 reads as a real, well-linked site, while CF 60 / TF 5 reads as a link farm.
How it affects your traffic
When we vet link prospects for a campaign, Citation Flow is a first-pass filter, not the verdict. A high CF backed by a matching Trust Flow means a domain is both widely linked and trusted, the kind of placement that actually moves rankings and earns citations in AI search. A high CF with a collapsed Trust Flow is the signature of a link farm we skip. Our link building targets referring domains that lift both metrics together, because chasing raw Citation Flow inflates a vanity number while doing nothing for the organic traffic you are paying for.
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