See which businesses AI recommends — in the markets you actually serve.

Ask an AI for a plumber, a dentist or a lawyer and the answer changes city by city. Cite AI asks every major engine from inside the markets you serve.

Start free — no card needed See how it works

All 6 answer engines — including both Google AI surfacesPer-market tracking — city-level or better on 4 of the 614-day free trial · no card required

Citation share of voice

Illustrative example · 20 prompts · Charlotte, NC

3 gaps found

acmehvac.com38%

contosoclimate.com29%

You (your site)24%

acmeclimate.com9%

Monitored AI Engines

ChatGPT38% SOV

Gemini24% SOV

Claude19% SOV

Perplexity15% SOV

usecite.ai/analytics

Overview›Analytics · Contoso Dental

Contoso DentalActive

contosodental.com · 6 prompts · ChatGPT, Gemini · Week-over-week

W21 – W16 · 6 wks ▾

AI Visibility

75%weekly average

Share of Voice

27%39 of 142 citations

Brand Citations

39vs 32 last week

Prompts Tracked

6active prompts

Brand Visibility — Weekly

Weekly share · contosodental.com vs competitors · 6 weeks

75%

↑ +6 pts vs W20

contosodental.com75%

competitor avg41%

The Search Shift

AI is already deciding which businesses get recommended. Are you in the answer?

Customers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's own AI answers who to hire, who to buy from, and who to call — and those answers name only a handful of businesses.

Unlike a results page with ten blue links, an AI engine synthesizes a single answer citing a median of just 8 sources — and nearly two-thirds of those citations point to pages outside Google's top 10. If your domain isn't cited, you're invisible to these high-intent buyers, and your Google ranking won't save you.

Our own research panel

60 commercial prompts × 6 answer engines × 16 weeks, April–July 2026. We analyzed 1,275 AI answers and 11,131 citations to find out what actually gets cited. Read the full methodology →

Scope note: this panel covers financial, legal and accounting services at national scope. Home-services and medical panels are running now and will be published as they mature — we won't restate these figures as local-service numbers until they are.

Domains Cited By All 6 Engines

Not one, across 1,275 answers. 66% of cited domains appeared on a single engine — checking ChatGPT tells you almost nothing about the other five.

64%

Cited Beyond Top 10

64% of AI citations point to pages outside Google's top 10 results. SEO rank alone won't get you cited.

45%

Gone By Next Week

45% of the domains AI cited one week were missing the next in our tracked panel. Weekly monitoring is how you catch it.

Sources Per Answer

Median citations in an AI answer. Only a handful of brands make the cut for every prompt.

Local AI visibility

A national tracker can't see a local business.

Ask an AI the same question from two different cities and you get two largely different sets of businesses. We tested it on the engines that localize: for local-service prompts, the businesses cited in one metro barely overlapped with those cited in another — and both differed from the national answer. A tool that asks without a location — or that only lets you pick a country — is measuring a market your customers don't live in. Country-level tracking is useful if you sell in Germany and France; it cannot tell Charlotte from Raleigh.

Tag a prompt with a city or metro and Cite AI asks each engine as a searcher standing there. Track one market or every market a business serves, then switch your whole dashboard between them — a roofer strong in Charlotte and invisible in Raleigh sees which is which.

Then it gets more specific than a city.

Turn on grid tracking and one prompt runs at nine or twenty-five points across the market instead of once. You see the neighbourhoods where the AI names you and the ones where it names a competitor — plus your Google map-pack rank at every point, which is the other half of the same problem.

We ran one prompt — “emergency plumber near me” — at nine points across Charlotte, twice at each point. Twenty-one different businesses came back across the grid, and eight of them appeared at only one of the nine points. Two runs at the same point returned mostly the same businesses; two different points shared about a third as much, and seven of the thirty-six pairs of points shared none at all. Points near each other overlapped three times more than points far apart — noise does not do that.

One prompt, one industry, one metro, measured on Gemini’s map results with two runs per point.

An engine named you here
Answered here, didn’t name you
Not measured yet

Grid tracking is on every paid plan.

A gridded prompt costs more than one, because it runs at every point: a 3 × 3 counts as four tracked prompts and a 5 × 5 as twelve.

How the map works →

Running this for clients? →

Agencies track 10 client markets on one subscription.

Answer Engine Optimization

Citation tracking, gap detection, and site audit — so you always know where you stand in AI answers.

Automated citation tracking

Every week, we ask the answer engines your tracked prompts and record who got cited. Runs aggregate by period so you compare stable trends, not noisy individual snapshots.

Per-engine attribution

See which engine — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, or AI Mode — is citing your brand, at what rate, and how that changes over time.

Per-market targeting

Point a prompt at a city or metro and we ask each engine from there. Run one market or every market a business serves — the competitors that show up in one often don't show up in the next. Every metric in Analytics narrows to the market you pick.

Prompt-level drill-down

Inspect every tracked prompt across every engine it ran on. See which domains the AI consistently cites, which are newly rising or receding, where your page sits in an AI answer, and which pages rank on Google but get skipped by AI.

Competitive gap detection

Identify prompts where competitors are cited and you're not. Each gap surfaces the cited source and specific content suggestions to close it.

Site Audit

Crawl your brand domain and score it against the factors that determine whether AI answer engines can find, parse, and cite your content — schema coverage, content structure, entity clarity, and crawler access.

AI-assisted prompt setup

Not sure which prompts to track? Describe your brand and industry — Cite AI suggests the prompts most likely to drive citations for your category, so you spend your prompt budget on prompts that matter.

Unify your AI presence

One view across every major answer engine.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode each draw from different source pools and cite at different rates — in our research, not a single domain was cited by all six. Cite AI normalizes tracking across every engine, so you can compare citation performance engine-by-engine and see where a content change made an impact.

ChatGPT

Highest market share of AI-driven searches — the baseline for exposure, and it localizes hard once a location is attached.

Claude

Returns the full context around every citation, so you can see how a business was actually described — not just whether it was named.

Google Gemini

Draws from Google's index — directly comparable to your SERP ranking.

Perplexity AI

Cites sources inline with rankings — closest proxy to traditional search position.

Google AI Overviews

The AI answer at the top of Google itself — the answer surface your buyers already see on every search.

Google AI Mode

Google's conversational search experience — an early read on where Google search is heading.

Answer engines monitored

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AIO & AI Mode

11k+

Citations analyzed

In our published AI citation research

Prompt-level

Citation attribution

Source, sentiment, position

CSV

Full data export

Every citation, engine, and sentiment

Three-step process

How Cite AI helps you defend your visibility

Defending your share of voice in the AI era doesn't require complex coding or manual testing.

Define your footprint

Add your domain, the market you serve, and your competitors, then list the questions you want tracked. Not sure where to start? Our AI assistant drafts the prompts for your category — worded the way local customers actually ask when the market is set to a city.

Automated engine probing

Our pipeline automatically queries ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode from the market each prompt targets, on a scheduled cadence — local projects run the four of those that can resolve a place. We extract exact citations, sentiment details, and competitor mentions.

Close citation gaps

Inspect your gaps dashboard to see where competitors are recommended instead of you — and, where an engine reports it, which prompts retrieved your page and answered without it. Recommendations are ranked by what we measured actually moves citation, not by folklore.

Pricing

Every plan tracks all six engines on national projects, four on local ones. Starting at $19/mo.

No per-engine add-ons and no base subscription. Start with a 14-day cardless free trial (20 prompts, 1 project) and upgrade as you grow.

For comparison: $99/mo here tracks 150 prompts across all six engines. Profound's $99 Starter tracks 50 prompts on ChatGPT only, and Semrush's AI toolkit is $99/mo per domain for 25 prompts, with extra prompts billed in $60 packs. See the full comparison →

All-in pricing, tax included. Converted to your local currency at checkout.

Starter

$19/ month

Brand baseline tracking for early stage brands checking core branded reach.

30 tracked prompts
1 active project
All 6 engines, weekly

Start with Starter

Growth

$49/ month

For growing brands that need category visibility, not just branded checks.

80 tracked prompts
2 active projects
All 6 engines, weekly

Start with Growth

Frequently Asked Questions

Have questions about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Cite AI? Here are answers to our most common queries.

What is a citation and why does it matter?

A citation is a reference or link to a website in an AI engine's answer. When a user asks an LLM (like ChatGPT or Gemini) a question about a product category, the LLM retrieves web pages and cites them as sources. If your brand is cited, you get direct visibility, traffic, and trust. Local answers work differently: an engine will often name a business and give its phone number without linking to any website at all. Cite AI tracks both, and matches a local business by its Google listing as well as by its domain — so being named and being cited are two separate results, and on a local project being named is the one that counts.

Does this work for a local business?

That is what it is built for. Tag a prompt with a city or metro and Cite AI asks each engine as a searcher standing there, so the businesses that come back are the ones competing for those customers rather than national chains. One caveat we publish rather than hide: Perplexity only localizes at country level, so treat its results as national. And where an answer draws on Google's business listings rather than the open web — the map card inside the AI app — the lever is the Google Business Profile, not website content.

How often does Cite AI check the answer engines?

We probe the supported answer engines weekly to update your dashboard. This schedule filters out the daily fluctuations and noise, providing you with stable, reliable trends for your optimization efforts.

Is there a credit card required for the 14-day trial?

No, you can sign up for our 14-day trial without entering a credit card. You'll get access to track 20 prompts in 1 project so you can experience the platform before deciding to upgrade.

Which AI answer engines are supported?

We currently support tracking and citation extraction across six engines: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Google Gemini, Perplexity AI, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode.

What is the difference between 'searched' and 'cited' domains?

AI engines often fetch several web pages during their search process ('searched' domains) but only cite a subset of them in their final response ('cited' domains). Cite AI tracks both, letting you see where your pages were read but skipped, highlighting optimization opportunities.

Can I cancel or change my subscription at any time?

Yes, you can cancel or change your plan at any time directly from your billing settings. If you cancel, your subscription will remain active until the end of your current billing cycle.

Somewhere in your market, an AI just recommended someone else.

Find out who — and what it would take to be named instead.

Start free — no card needed See how it works

14-day free trial · No credit card required · 20 prompts & 1 project limit