A mention names your brand in an answer. A citation links your brand as the source the answer is built from. Engines treat the two differently, and so should you: being named is visibility, being cited is authority.
Why it matters
It is easy to read any appearance in an answer as a win. But a mention can be neutral or even wrong, while a citation means the engine trusted your page enough to build on it and point back.
The two move for different reasons. You can be widely mentioned and rarely cited, which tells you the engines know you but do not yet treat you as a source; or cited on a few pages that are quietly doing real work.
Keeping them separate keeps the goal honest. Presence in the answer and authorship of the answer are different jobs, and conflating them hides which one you are actually winning.
How Jinn treats it
Jinn keeps the two readings apart. Whether an engine names your brand and whether it cites a domain as a source are recorded separately, because collapsing them would flatter the weaker signal.
So a report can tell you where you are present but uncited, and where you are the source the answer leans on. They are different problems, and the fixes are different too.
Related terms
Named is not the same as cited.
One is visibility, the other is authority. See how Fama keeps the two apart.