Introducing b/cited: track whether AI assistants cite your brand

A growing share of buyer research no longer starts on Google. It starts inside an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — that returns a single synthesized answer drawn from a handful of cited sources.

If your brand isn't one of those sources, you're not on page two. You're not anywhere.

That gap is the reason b/cited exists.

What b/cited is

b/cited is an Answer Engine Optimization platform. Point it at your domain. It runs the questions your buyers are actually asking against ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, then tells you:

• Whether each engine cited your domain
• Whether your brand was mentioned without a link
• Which competitors were cited in your place
• Which of your pages were pulled in, and which were ignored
• Which tracked prompts you're winning, losing, or absent from

It rolls those signals into a single 0–100 Visibility Score, broken out per engine, and pairs them with the Topical Cluster and Authority data we pull from Google Search Console.

Then it tells you what to change on each page that's losing.

Why this is its own product, not an SEO feature

Ranking on Google means showing up. Being cited by an LLM means being chosen — out of an entire trained-and-retrieved corpus — as the source worth quoting.

The signals overlap. They don't match.

Three concrete differences:

• Cite-ability beats click-ability. Pages optimized for SERP CTR — punchy titles, scarcity language, urgency — underperform in AEO. LLMs prefer flat, extractable claims over persuasion-heavy copy.
• The optimization surface is broader. Schema markup, structured data density, glossary depth, citation density, topical coherence at the embedding level — these matter for AEO in a way they don't for traditional SEO.
• Citations are zero-sum. A SERP shows ten results. An AI answer cites two or three. Losing the cite means losing the entire surface for that query — not slipping a position.

Tools that bolt AEO onto an SEO suite as a small dashboard tab will sell for eighteen months and then get displaced by purpose-built ones. We started from the AEO side and built the SEO surface area we needed around it, rather than the other way around.

What you can do today

Free — one project, five AEO prompts run on demand, three content briefs a month, one site readiness audit a month, CSV export. No credit card. Real data, not a demo.

Solo — $39 / month — one project, twenty-five prompts tracked daily, ten briefs a month, two audits a month, and a public AEO Visibility Card you can share.

Pro — $99 / month — five projects, seventy-five prompts tracked daily, fifty briefs a month, unlimited audits, twenty article drafts a month, XLSX and Google Sheets export, and the 3D cluster map.

Agency — $299 / month — ten projects, two hundred and fifty prompts tracked daily, unlimited briefs, audits and drafts, white-label Visibility Cards in your own branding, and a monthly readiness report you can hand to a client.

Annual billing is ten months for twelve on every paid tier.

The free scan takes about thirty seconds. It returns the same Visibility Score that paid users see — just on a single prompt run, instead of tracked daily.

How to think about the first scan

The first time you scan your domain, three things commonly happen, and each one points to a different next step:

1. Zero citations across all three engines. This is the most common outcome — by a margin. You're not penalized. You're absent. The work is editorial: explicit Q&A blocks, FAQ schema, citable claims on the pages you want LLMs to pull from.
2. Mentions but no citations. Your brand name appears in answers but no link is given. This is a strong signal: the model knows you exist but hasn't selected you as a source. The work is narrower — usually clearer answer-shape content on the queries already surfacing the mention.
3. Cited on some prompts, absent on others. You're in the consideration set. The work is identifying the content gap — which queries should cite you and don't — and prioritizing the pages with the smallest distance to citation.

b/cited identifies which scenario applies on a prompt-by-prompt basis and gives you the edit list.

What's shipped, and what hasn't

Live now: the free scan, Visibility Score, tracked prompts, content briefs, readiness audits, public and white-label Visibility Cards, Google Search Console integration, XLSX and Google Sheets export, and monthly readiness reports.

Also live since this post first went up: the public AEO Leaderboard — AEO readiness rankings across twelve industry categories, free to browse, no account needed.

Still on the roadmap, with no date attached to it:

• Custom domain support for Agency white-label cards
• Source-citation diff alerts: get notified when an engine swaps you out for a competitor on a tracked prompt
• Cross-channel attribution built on the Google Search Console data we already sync

Common questions

Which AI engines does b/cited track? ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic) and Perplexity — on every tier, including the free one. Google Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot are not covered today. If Gemini or Copilot is where your buyers are, say so before you pay us: other tools in this category cover them and we don't.

How fast is a scan? A free scan returns in under thirty seconds. Every paid tier — Solo, Pro and Agency — runs your tracked prompts daily on a managed schedule, so results land in the dashboard without manual scanning. Free runs prompts when you ask it to.

Do I need to add a script tag or pixel to my site? No. b/cited works entirely from the outside. We optionally connect to Google Search Console (read-only) so we can pair AEO data with your existing organic-search performance.

How is AEO different from traditional SEO? SEO optimizes for ranking on a results page; AEO optimizes for being cited inside an AI-generated answer. The signals overlap but the failure modes are different — losing a citation removes you from the answer entirely, where losing a SERP position drops you a few clicks.

What if I have no citations at all? That's the common starting point, not a problem. b/cited identifies which pages are closest to citation-ready and gives you the specific edits — Q&A structure, schema, citation density — that move pages from absent to mentioned to cited.

Can I export the data? Yes. CSV is on every tier, free included. Pro and Agency add XLSX and Google Sheets. Agency also gets a monthly readiness report, delivered as a signed link to a web page rather than a file, so a client can open it without a download.

What does b/cited cost? Free is free, no card. Solo is $39/month or $390/year. Pro is $99/month or $990/year. Agency is $299/month or $2,990/year. Every annual plan is ten months for twelve.

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If you want to know whether AI assistants are citing your brand, the free scan is the fastest place to start. If you want it running on autopilot, sign in with Google and b/cited will connect to Search Console and begin tracking a prompt set you define.