Citation Flow is a Majestic metric, scored 1 to 100, that measures the raw quantity of links pointing at a website, how many sites and pages cite it, without judging whether those links come from good company or bad. A page with a thousand low-quality backlinks can post a higher Citation Flow than one with fifty excellent ones.
That's why Majestic pairs it with Trust Flow, a companion metric that weighs link quality instead of volume. A site with high Citation Flow but low Trust Flow is worth investigating: it often means a lot of the links come from spammy, low-value, or unrelated sites rather than sources search engines would treat as meaningful endorsements. The two together give a rough map of a site's link profile that neither number tells on its own. Backlinks from genuinely authoritative, topically relevant sites tend to raise both scores at once, which is the profile worth building toward rather than optimizing for volume alone.
