Get your product mentioned and cited by
ChatGPT

Answer engine optimization is the practice of getting your product named, and your pages cited, inside the answers AI assistants give — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and the rest — rather than inside a list of blue links. It differs from SEO in what it optimizes for: an answer engine reads a handful of pages and writes one recommendation, so the goal is to be the source that recommendation is built from.

Yes, in two separate ways, and they answer different questions. Your own server can report every request an assistant makes to your pages, so you see ChatGPT opening a page to build an answer, verified against the IP ranges OpenAI publishes. That tells you what was read. Separately, asking the engines your buyers' questions on a schedule and recording the sources in each answer tells you what was cited. Being read is not being named, but nothing gets named without being read. CiteGraph does both: a tracker you install on your site, and repeated scans across four engines.

It retrieves a handful of pages at answer time and writes a recommendation from what they say. So the pages that get mentioned are the ones that state a usable claim plainly: a price, a limit, who it is for. Most of the pages an assistant cites when recommending a product are not the brand's own, which is why listicles, forums and review sites often carry more weight than a homepage. Getting mentioned is less about your own site and more about being on the pages the engine already trusts for that question.

Find the buyer questions where an assistant already answers without you, read the pages it cited to build that answer, and get the missing claim about your product onto one of those pages — or onto a page of your own that answers the question better. CiteGraph measures which questions you lose, shows the verbatim answer and the cited sources, and writes the specific sentence that would have qualified you.

No. We tested it and found no measurable effect on citation rates. Assistants cite pages they retrieve and read at answer time; a manifest file at your root is not part of that path. Several tools sell llms.txt generators anyway. We say this publicly because it costs us nothing to be honest about it.

No, and the difference matters. A mention means the assistant named your product in its prose. A citation means your own page was used as a source. In our measurements, 44% of the pages cited when recommending a product belong to somebody else — so a product can be recommended constantly while its own words never reach the buyer. Mention rate is the vanity metric; the cited-source map is the actionable one.

We write ten buyer questions for your category, ask each one three times on four AI engines through their official APIs, and record which products are named and which URLs are cited. Rates are sampled, so every number is published with its margin of error, and we only flag a change when it moves beyond that margin. Nothing is scraped from a chat UI and nothing is simulated.

Signing up shows you a site readiness score and one live AI answer on your own domain for nothing. Your first full scan runs the moment you pick a plan and add a card, with nothing charged for 7 days. Plans start at $29 a month for weekly tracking of two domains; Growth is $69 and Scale $149, and every plan carries a 120-day money-back guarantee. Without a plan, a scan is $12 with no subscription (your first purchase gets 2). There is no ongoing free tier because each scan spends real API money on live engine calls.

Then you get your money back. Every paid plan carries a 120-day guarantee: if no CiteGraph scan shows ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity naming your product within 120 days of your first payment, we refund every subscription payment from those days. Your side is to keep the plan and weekly scans on and publish three of the pages CiteGraph writes for the questions you lose. It is checked from your own scan history; the full terms are at citegraph.app/terms.

No. Positions on the public category leaderboards are measured from engine answers and cannot be bought, boosted or edited by anyone, including us. There are no sponsored rows and no featured slots. CiteGraph itself does not appear in its own AI search visibility leaderboard, and we published that anyway.

Three production answer engines are queried for every scan through their official grounded-search APIs, so results reflect what a real buyer would see rather than a cached index. Each question is run multiple times per engine because answers vary between runs, and the per-engine breakdown is shown alongside the blended rate.