Find out if AI recommends your business. Or your competitor's.
Your buyers are asking ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity questions your business should be answering. Most are invisible in those answers and have no idea. AI sends high-intent traffic to whoever shows up instead. Finding out where you stand is where it starts.
See how AI reads your site. Free, in about a minute.
The free scan scores your homepage on Technical SEO and AEO Readiness. When you want the whole picture, the full report is $79: 20 prompts across 4 AI platforms, tested as your real buyer types.
Why isn't my business showing up in AI answers?
AI engines recommend businesses they can verify and recognize. Verification comes from structured signals on your site. Recognition comes from your brand's footprint across the web. If either one is weak, all four platforms will name whoever gave them more to work with.
CitedScore runs your domain against real prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity. It tests your visibility as the four most likely buyer types for your business, then classifies every result. Your PDF Report tells you:
- Who got named
- Who got used as an uncredited source
- Which competitor took your spot
- The specific signals you need to change
Same question. Same buyer. Different answer.
Here are the top HubSpot partners in Europe based on current reviews and case studies:
- Competitor A, London, UK
- Competitor B, Berlin, DE
- Competitor C, Amsterdam, NL
- Competitor D, Madrid, ES
- Competitor E, Dublin, IE
Sources: hubspot.com · competitorA.com · competitorB.com · g2.com
✗ Your domain: never named, never sourcedHere are the top HubSpot partners in Europe based on current reviews and case studies:
- your-domain.com
- Competitor A, London, UK
- Competitor B, Berlin, DE
- Competitor C, Amsterdam, NL
- Competitor D, Madrid, ES
Sources: your-domain.com · hubspot.com · g2.com · competitorA.com
✓ Your domain: named in the answer and cited as a source, position #1Stacked here, so the difference in one line: before, absent from the answer and missing from the sources. After, named first and cited as a source, on the same prompt.
Right now, someone is asking a question your business should be answering. When a competitor's site gives the engines more to work with than yours does, they're the ones getting named. CitedScore runs those exact prompts against your real domain, across all four platforms, and shows you the answer they got.
You can be a source and still be invisible
There are two ways to appear in an AI answer, and they are worth very different amounts of money.
A mention means the AI names your brand in the answer itself. The buyer reads your name. That's the appearance that drives revenue.
A citation means the AI links your site as a source. Useful, and research across 3,981 domain appearances found that 61.7% of domain appearances were ghost citations: the AI pulled from the site and never named the brand.3 Your content did the work. A reader walked away without ever learning you exist.
ghostis how a ghost citation is marked in your report.
The gap between the two is measurable. Semrush's July 2026 topic authority research found that across 1,094 categories, the most-cited domains matched the most-mentioned brand in only 21% of cases.5 Being used as a source and being named are separate games, and only one of them puts your name in front of a buyer.
CitedScore classifies every query result into three states: Mentioned (named in the answer), Cited only (used as a source, never named: a ghost citation), or Both. Then it tells you which lever moves each one.
Two separate systems decide whether AI recommends you
And they respond to different fixes.
Citations are earned on your site
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, those platforms retrieve and extract. Schema markup, question-structured headings, llms.txt, content depth: these are the signals that make your pages extractable. If they're missing, the AI pulls from whoever has them.
Mentions are earned across the web
AI engines name brands they've seen consistently: in community discussions, industry coverage, comparison content, and corroborated entity signals. A site can be perfectly structured and still go unnamed if the brand is an isolated node nobody else talks about.
Most businesses are weak on one lever and blind to the other. CitedScore audits both, plus the technical foundation underneath, and shows you the live results across all four platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity. Then it maps the gap between where you are and where you need to be, and tells you exactly what to fix first.
The full methodology, in one deep page
Crawling, persona generation, scoring, ghost-citation detection. Every step is written down, including the ones that can fail and what happens when they do.
Read the methodologyCrawl, audit, then ask the AI itself
CitedScore crawls your website, runs a full SEO, AEO, and GEO audit, then tests your real visibility with live queries across all four platforms. One scan tells you something your analytics dashboard never will: whether AI engines are recommending you, quietly using you as an uncredited source, or sending your buyers somewhere else.
Technical SEO
Meta tags, schema validation, heading structure, mobile viewport, sitemap, HTTPS, image optimization. The foundation everything else sits on. If these are broken, nothing above them matters.
AEO Readiness
How extractable your content is to AI platforms. Schema completeness, question-based headings, answer density, llms.txt, AI crawler access, entity corroboration. This is the on-site lever: the signals that turn your pages into source material AI can use with confidence.
GEO Citation
Live results. Four buyer personas, 20 real prompts across four platforms, every result classified Mentioned, Cited only, Both, or Absent, plus a blended score weighted by where buyers actually ask. Mentions weigh more than citations, because a named recommendation is the result that drives revenue. And you get a Perception Gap: how your site presents your business, how AI sees it, and where the two diverge.
Why this directly affects your revenue
When AI names your business, the person reading that answer arrived with a specific question already answered. They asked an AI they trust, and it handed them your name. Shopify's Q1 2026 commerce data puts numbers on what that visit is worth.
If a competitor is being named and you're showing up as an anonymous source link (or worse, never showing up at all) those high-intent buyers go to them. They were ready to purchase. The competitor earned the recommendation. CitedScore shows you exactly which signals you're missing and which ones are leaking value as ghost citations.
And the field is still open. Semrush's July 2026 topic authority study measured how many categories already have a clear AI-visibility owner, and in most of them nobody does yet.
Visibility on one platform tells you nothing about the others
ChatGPT
40%Retrieval-driven. Responds fastest to on-site structure: schema, headings, and extractable answers.
Google AI Overviews
35%The AI layer inside Google Search itself. The single largest AI answer surface your buyers see.
Gemini
15%Knowledge-driven. Names brands it already recognizes. Responds to brand footprint across the web.
Perplexity
10%Retrieval-native with visible sources. Every answer shows exactly who earned the citation.
CitedScore checks all four, every audit. The percentage is each platform's weight in your blended score.
AI answers vary by run, by phrasing, and by model version. Every score here comes from 80 observations per audit, 20 prompts across all four platforms, and the methodology page publishes how that variance is handled.
Built on 20 years of engineering methodology
He is a senior software engineer with 20 years building web platforms where technical performance had a direct line to revenue: campaigns at Red Ventures, conversion architecture at Zappos and Experian, funded startup builds at Electric. When his clients started asking whether they were showing up in AI answers, nothing he tested gave a real answer at the code level. So he spent hundreds of hours building one on his own methodology.
Your buyers don't all ask the same question
Most AI visibility tools run the same generic queries against your domain. "Best [category] in [city]." "What is [brand name]." Every brand gets the same prompts.
A budget-conscious first-time buyer types differently than an experienced operator comparing platforms. A procurement manager phrases things differently than a founder doing their own research. The same business can be visible to one type of buyer and completely absent for another. That gap is where revenue leaks.
CitedScore's engine reads your site and builds four buyer personas before it runs a single prompt. Each persona reflects a real buyer type for your business, using the vocabulary they actually use. Then it runs prompts as each one, and asks each persona's key question both ways, in short conversational phrasing and in long structured phrasing, because Semrush and Kevin Indig's June 2026 research found the two formats produce dramatically different AI responses.
The report tells you which buyer types find you, which platforms surface you for them, and where you're invisible to the audience most likely to convert.
What's your maturity rung?
A 0–100 score is precise, but it doesn't tell you what it means. Every CitedScore report places your brand on the CitedScore Maturity Ladder, a five-rung scale built from your own measured AI visibility: how often you're named, how often you're cited, and where you land when you are named.
Maturity models for this are not new: Webflow's AEO Maturity Model is one. What makes the CitedScore Maturity Ladder different is where the rung comes from. Yours is set by measured findings across all four platforms, not by anything you tell us about yourself, and a strong score on paper cannot buy a rung your live AI results do not support.
Read the Maturity Ladder definition in the glossaryInvisible
Not appearing in AI answers for your category
Overlooked
Named occasionally, rarely leading the answer
Mentioned
Consistently named across AI answers
Recommended
Named early and used as a source
Cited Authority
The default citation for your category
A professional PDF report you can hand to a decision-maker
Plain English, cover to cover. You can read it over coffee, send it to your team, and let it explain itself to whoever opens it next.
- 01Cover and scores: your domain, the audit date, your overall score with all three sub-scores, and your rung on the five-level maturity ladder, with the specific gate to the next one.
- 02Where you stand: a snapshot of the audit, the full maturity ladder showing which levels you have cleared and which you have not, and your single biggest win and biggest opportunity.
- 03The action plan, prioritized: every fix ranked by expected impact, each with a priority and the outcome it moves, so you know what to fix first. Where the work can be sized, the plan shows the effort and who owns it. In-depth findings sit behind the plan.
- 04Executive summary and checklists: two plain-language insights that change how you read the audit, then the complete Technical SEO and AEO checklists, issues and passed checks both, with specific fixes attached.
- 05Platform visibility: score, mention rate, and citation rate for each of the four AI platforms, followed by a deep dive on every one.
- 06Query results query by query, platform by platform, grouped by buyer persona. Every result classified as Mentioned, Cited only (ghost citation), Both, or Absent. Includes a full competitor gap table showing which domains are being named in your place, and the prompts you’re missing from.
- 07Who we tested as, and how: the Company Profile extracted from your site, the four buyer personas with their journey stories, the off-site evidence behind your mention rate, and the full methodology, from prompt generation to score calculation, with the raw response cards in the appendix.
The audit runs automatically. An engineer reviews every report by hand.
Monitoring tools tell you a number. A report tells you why.
| Capability | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI Toolkit | CitedScore |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Visibility Report | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI Toolkit | CitedScore$79 per site |
| Monthly monitoring | Otterly.AI$29–489/mo (prompt-based) | Semrush + AI Toolkit$239/mo minimum | CitedScoreYes, opens November 10, 2026 |
| Agency / multi-site | Otterly.AICustom, prompt volume pricing | Semrush + AI Toolkit$500 + $99 add-on/mo | CitedScoreYes, opens November 10, 2026 |
| Platforms extra? | Otterly.AIYes, add-ons per platform | Semrush + AI ToolkitYes, AI Toolkit add-on required | CitedScoreNo, all four included |
| Google AI Overviews included | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI Toolkit | CitedScore |
| Technical SEO audit | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI Toolkit | CitedScore |
| AEO content scoring | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI ToolkitPartial | CitedScore |
| Mentioned vs cited classification | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI ToolkitTopic-level | CitedScorePer prompt, per platform |
| Buyer persona testing | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI Toolkit | CitedScorePer buyer type |
| Competitor gap data | Otterly.AIPartial | Semrush + AI ToolkitPartial | CitedScore |
| Professional PDF Report | Otterly.AI | Semrush + AI Toolkit | CitedScore |
Competitor pricing verified July 2026. Sourced from public pricing pages.
The AI visibility report is the fastest way in.
$79. One site. Every AI platform. Four buyer personas. Full PDF report. No subscription, no commitment.
Every report includes the full competitor gap table: which domains are being named in your place, on which prompts, on which platforms.
Four buyer personas, both phrasing formats, four platforms, every result classified. That's the audit.
Run my free scanMonthly monitoring and agency plans open November 10, 2026.
Questions worth answering before you buy
If yours isn't here, the methodology page goes deeper on how every score is produced.
01Which AI platforms does CitedScore check?
02When does CitedScore launch?
03Does this work for any website platform?
04What if my site uses heavy JavaScript rendering or bot protection?
05Why doesn't CitedScore test on Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek, or Claude?
06Is this report AI-generated?
Everything behind the numbers is published
Every term on this page, in plain English
AEO, GEO, ghost citations, entity corroboration. Each one has a definition you can check before you trust a score built on it.
Browse the glossaryWe asked ChatGPT to audit our own homepage
It scored us, caught a real gap, and told us what to build next. The whole exchange is published, including the part where it was wrong.
Read the findingsSomeone in your category is already showing up in AI answers. The audit runs automatically and an engineer reviews every report by hand. Your report tells you exactly what to fix.
See how AI reads your site. Free, in about a minute.
The free scan scores your homepage on Technical SEO and AEO Readiness. When you want the whole picture, the full report is $79: 20 prompts across 4 AI platforms, tested as your real buyer types.