Right now, AI is answering
“easiest way to invoice freelance work”“
— and citing someone else.

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.

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.

Your first scan is free, one per account. After that: $12 for a scan with no subscription (your first purchase gets 2), or a plan from $29 a month for weekly tracking of two domains, with a 7-day trial that requires a card but charges nothing up front. Growth is $69 and Scale $149. There is no ongoing free tier because each scan spends real API money on live engine calls.

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.