Citation Scan
See who the AI engines cite in your category
$49 USD · 10 questions × 6 engines · one-off
Your analytics can tell you a visitor arrived from ChatGPT. They cannot tell you what ChatGPT said, or whose domain it cited while saying it. The Citation Scan asks ten pinned questions about a category you name across six answer engines, and records every domain cited in all sixty answers — yours among them, if it appears.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the work of getting cited inside the answers AI systems generate. This scan measures the outcome of that work — which domains actually got cited — rather than scoring the conditions that make citation more likely. Both matter. They are different questions.
What the scan returns
Four artifacts, delivered together in your dashboard. Every one of them is an observation you can check, not a score you have to trust.
60 observed answers
Ten pinned questions about the category you name, asked across six engines. The same ten questions run against every engine, so the comparison is like for like rather than six separate experiments.
ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini · Perplexity · Google AI Overview · Google AI Mode
The citation grid
One row for each of the sixty question-and-engine pairs, listing every domain that answer cited — including the rows where nothing was cited at all. You read the observation itself, not a score derived from rows you never see.
10 questions × 6 engines
Presence-share ranking
Every domain the engines cited, ranked against you by how many of the sixty answers it turned up in. You submit no competitor list: the engines decide who is in the ranking, which is exactly the finding.
Ranked by answers citing it
Coverage disclosure
Every scan ships with a statement of which engines answered, which answers came back empty, and what that does to the counts. A citation number without its coverage is a number you cannot audit — so the disclosure is part of the deliverable, not a footnote we might add.
Ships with every scan
Presence share · answers citing each domain
Shape only, not a real run. Each square is one question on one engine, and a filled one is an answer that cited your domain — in the report itself, each of those sixty is a row listing every domain it cited. The ranking underneath is every domain the engines named, which is why a buyers' guide you have never tracked can outrank you in it.
How the scan works
Run the free Diagnostic
The scan reads your domain from a completed Diagnostic rather than a checkout field, so the free run comes first. Five to ten minutes, no credit card, and you keep the ten-pillar report either way.
Name your category
Type the category you want to be found in, in your own words — it is a text field, not a menu of categories we decided for you. The ten pinned questions are applied to what you type.
Read the grid
The scan queries all six engines and lands in about five minutes as its own report in your dashboard, alongside your Diagnostic reports. No scheduling, no analyst, no waiting on a deliverable.
What the scan will not tell you
The boundary is the product. A measurement that quietly widens its own claims is worth less than one that states where it stops.
No estimates, no forecasts
The scan reports citations it observed in sixty answers. Nothing is modelled, volume-weighted, or extrapolated to a market. If an engine did not cite a domain in one of those answers, that domain is not in the count.
You do not choose the competitors
The ranking is every domain the engines cited, not a list you supply. It will name domains you have never tracked, and it will leave out a rival the engines did not mention for these questions.
It is not part of the Diagnostic
The free Diagnostic scores your Discoverability pillar, including the AEO and GEO sub-scores that read whether engines can reach and reference you. It does not measure how often they cite you. That measurement is this scan, bought separately.
It is a point-in-time observation
A scan records what six engines answered on the day it ran. Run it again after you change something to see movement. If you need continuous tracking, a dedicated monitoring tool is the right instrument and we will say so.
Results stay in your dashboard
We do not email you a report. The grid lives in your account against the order that paid for it, where you can re-read it alongside your Diagnostic reports.
Where this sits next to a dedicated tracker
There is a whole category of tools that measures AI-search visibility and nothing else. They go deeper on that surface than we do. Here is the split, stated the way we would want it stated to us.
What the $49 scan gives you
Six answer engines, ten pinned questions, sixty answers, and a presence-share ranking in which the engines — not you — decide which domains appear. One payment, one scan, no subscription, and a coverage disclosure stating which engines answered.
What a monitoring subscription is for
A running time series with daily re-checks, brand-sentiment tracking, prompt-volume discovery, analytics on the AI crawlers hitting your own site, and content workflows built on top of the measurement. This scan does none of that, and the tools built for it go deeper on that surface than we do. If that is what you need, buy that — or buy both.
What the scan sits inside
Citation share is one reading of one pillar — Discoverability. The free Diagnostic scores ten, and every one of them carries the perception gap — what you rated yourself against what we independently detected. The scan lands on the same shelf as that report, for the same domain, so a citation result reads against the infrastructure underneath it.
We score those tools — and our own row — on one published rubric, from public surfaces, with retrieval dates on the evidence. See how the Discoverability tools score on The Readiness Bench →
Subject to market rates
One payment, one scan. No subscription required — a Free-plan account with a completed Diagnostic can buy it, and the sixty answers, the grid, the presence-share ranking and the coverage disclosure come with every scan at every plan level.
Where the scan fits in the rest of the ladder: pricing and the Audit stream.
Buy the scan
$49 USD, one scan, no subscription. The scan reads the domain it measures from a completed Diagnostic, so if you have not run one yet you are pointed at the free run first — five to ten minutes, and you keep the ten-pillar report whether or not you buy the scan afterwards.