Citation Scan
See who the AI engines cite in your category
$29 USD · 10 questions × 6 engines, plus up to 5 head-to-head questions when you name competitors · one-off · $19 to re-scan
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. You choose the country they are asked from: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or Australia. Another country is another scan.
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, plus up to 5 head-to-head questions when you name competitors
Presence-share ranking
Every domain the engines cited, ranked against you by how many of the sixty answers it turned up in. The engines decide who else is in the ranking, which is exactly the finding. Any competitors you name are ranked too, even when no answer cites them.
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
Head-to-head questions
Name your competitors and the scan also asks who the engines suggest as alternatives to each one, and, with one or two named, how they compare each with you. Those answers are reported on their own, outside the ten-question share.
Up to 5 questions, only when you name competitors
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
Choose the domain
Start from a completed Diagnostic and the domain, a category and the competitors it found are filled in for you. Or type a domain and your own competitors. The free Diagnostic takes five to ten minutes, with no credit card.
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.
Naming competitors does not choose the ranking
The ranking is every domain the engines cited, plus the competitors you name. Naming a rival puts it in the table at whatever share the answers gave it, zero included. It also adds head-to-head questions about that rival, but those answers are reported on their own and never enter the ranking, which will still name domains you have never tracked.
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.
A country is not a local searcher
Google AI Overview and AI Mode are rendered from the country you choose. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are given it as a location hint, which the model may not follow. Gemini cannot be location-targeted at all, so its answers are not located, and the scan says so.
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 $29 scan gives you
Six answer engines, ten pinned questions, sixty answers, and a presence-share ranking in which the engines decide which domains appear, beside the competitors you name. One payment, one scan, no subscription required, and a coverage disclosure stating which engines answered. Re-scan the same domain, category and country later for $19, or Watch it monthly for $19 USD a month, cancel anytime.
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. When you start the scan from a Diagnostic, it runs for the domain of that report and names the competitors the report found, ranking each of them even at zero.
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
Re-scan the same domain, category and country for $19 USD (~CAD $25 / ~AUD $30)
Watch it monthly: one scan of the same domain, category and country every month for $19 USD, cancel anytime.
One payment, one scan. No subscription required — a Free-plan account 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
$29 USD for one scan, no subscription required, and $19 to re-scan the same domain, category and country later so the two scans compare — or Watch it monthly for $19 USD, cancel anytime. Start it from a completed Diagnostic and the scan names the competitors that report found, or type a domain without one. The free Diagnostic takes five to ten minutes, and you keep the ten-pillar report whether or not you buy the scan.
Per-run purchases are non-refundable once the deliverable has been produced — see the Terms of Service, Section 4B.