# Citedly — full site content for LLM retrieval > Citedly is an AI visibility (GEO) platform. It answers one question for a business: "When a customer asks an AI about our category, do we get mentioned — and cited?" It does that with a free deterministic audit, then daily citation tracking across the four major engines. ## What Citedly does Citedly tracks how a brand appears in AI answers. For each prompt you define, it asks the question to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude and records: - **Mentioned** — did the brand appear in the answer at all? - **Cited** — did the engine cite your site (a source link) in the answer? - **Position** — where in the answer the brand appeared (top, middle, bottom). - **Sentiment** — positive, neutral or negative framing. - **Share of voice** — your mention rate vs the competitors you name. ## How it works 1. **Audit (free, deterministic).** Citedly fetches your public site and scores the factors AI engines rely on: llms.txt, schema.org markup, entity consistency, crawlability and content structure. No AI calls, no cost, no credit card. 2. **Track (paid).** Paid plans run your prompt set across all four engines daily, recording mention, citation, position and sentiment per answer. 3. **Act.** Watch share of voice against competitors, get alerted when your position drops, and prove the lift with reports. ## By the numbers - 4 AI engines tracked: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude - 5 deterministic audit signals: llms.txt, schema.org markup, entity consistency, crawlability, content - ~30 second audit — no AI calls, no cost, no signup - $0 free tier: full audit plus weekly tracking on one engine - Daily tracking cadence on paid plans, per prompt, per engine - 100% server-side audits — zero inference spend ## Plans - **Free** — $0. Deterministic audit, 1 brand, 10 prompts, weekly tracking on 1 engine. No AI cost. - **Pro** — $49/mo. Daily tracking on all 4 engines, 50 prompts, share of voice, drop alerts (email + webhook), PDF reports. - **Agency** — $199/mo. 10 brands, 100 prompts, white-label PDF reports (your logo, no Citedly branding), public API and MCP tools. Billed monthly in USD via PayFast (card, EFT and instant EFT in South Africa). Cancel anytime. ## Free tools - **llms.txt generator** — type a domain, get a spec-compliant llms.txt draft and a score of the site's current llms.txt. No signup. ## Key pages - https://citedly.tech/ — home - https://citedly.tech/pricing — pricing and plan comparison - https://citedly.tech/tools/llms-generator — free llms.txt generator - https://citedly.tech/blog — blog - https://citedly.tech/verticals — AI visibility by industry - https://citedly.tech/about — about Citedly - https://citedly.tech/llms.txt — this site's llms.txt index ## Industries Citedly publishes industry-specific guides covering the prompts customers actually ask in each vertical: e-commerce, SaaS, finance, healthcare, legal, real estate, hospitality, education, manufacturing, logistics, automotive, insurance, retail, construction, agriculture, beauty, fitness, travel, technology, consulting, nonprofit, media, gaming and banking. See https://citedly.tech/verticals. ## Principles - **Deterministic code is the product core.** The audit and the scoring are fully deterministic — no LLM in the free path, no AI cost for the user. - **LLMs are scoped, capped and metered.** Paid tracking calls engines with per-user monthly caps (Free 0, Pro 2000, Agency 10000 AI calls) so cost is bounded and predictable. - **Privacy.** Citedly is built for POPIA (South Africa) and GDPR. Data-subject rights (access, correction, deletion, portability) are supported; see the privacy policy. ## Blog - What is AI visibility? — https://citedly.tech/blog/what-is-ai-visibility - llms.txt guide — https://citedly.tech/blog/llms-txt-guide - Share of voice in AI — https://citedly.tech/blog/share-of-voice-ai ## Share of Voice in AI: How to Measure What Competitors Can't Hide _Source: https://citedly.tech/blog/share-of-voice-ai · 2026-02-02_ Share of voice (SOV) has always been a marketing metric: what share of the conversation about your category do you own? In the paid-media era it meant ad spend. In the search era it meant how often you appeared on page one. In AI answers, SOV gets sharper — and more uncomfortable. Because an AI answer is a *recommendation*, not a list. When someone asks "best CRM for a 50-person sales team," the engine doesn't show ten results and let the user choose. It names a few. The question is no longer "are we in the conversation?" It's **"when the machine makes the call, does it make it for us?"** ## What AI share of voice actually measures For a given prompt, an AI answer can contain zero, one, or several brands. SOV in this context has three layers: 1. **Presence** — is your brand in the answer at all? (Mention rate: X of Y prompts.) 2. **Position** — when you're present, where? First-named brands get disproportionate attention; the first item in a list is the one people remember. 3. **Citation** — does the answer link to *your* site, or to a third party's? The uncomfortable part: these three can diverge. You might be mentioned in 80% of answers but cited in 10% — the engine knows your brand but sends readers to a comparison site. Or you might be cited for documentation-style questions while your competitor owns the recommendation prompts. ## Why competitors can't hide it Traditional SOV measurement has a blind spot: you can see your own ads and your own rankings, but you estimate the rest. AI answers invert this. The answer is *public text* — anyone can ask the same prompt and read the same answer. That means: - Your competitor's SOV is observable. Ask the prompt, count the names. - The engine's preference is stable enough to track. Ask it daily and the pattern emerges. - Changes are detectable in days, not quarters. A new comparison page on a competitor's site can shift an answer within a week. This is the same logic behind Citedly's tracking: a fixed prompt set, asked across engines on a schedule, with mention/citation/position recorded per answer. The delta between this week and last week is your SOV movement. ## How to build your own SOV baseline You don't need a tool to start — you need a prompt set and a spreadsheet. 1. **Write 15–30 prompts.** Mix: category recommendations ("best X for Y"), competitor comparisons ("X vs Y"), and problem queries ("how to solve Z"). Use the words your customers actually type. 2. **Ask each prompt in 2–3 engines.** ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini behave differently — an SOV number without an engine label is meaningless. 3. **Record per answer:** brands mentioned, order, links present, and a one-line sentiment note. 4. **Repeat weekly for a month.** Then compute: mention rate per engine, average position, citation rate, and your share of named brands across all answers. After a month you'll have something no competitor can fake: a baseline. Everything you do next — content, schema, llms.txt, comparison pages — gets measured against it. ## Where to go from a manual baseline Manual tracking works until it doesn't: 30 prompts × 4 engines × daily is 120 answers a day, and nobody wants to read 120 answers by hand. That's the job Citedly automates — daily prompt runs across engines, mention/citation/position tracking, share-of-voice against the competitor brands you name, and alerts when your position drops. Start with the [free audit](/tools/llms-generator) to see the deterministic side of your visibility, then set up tracking on a paid plan when you want the numbers to keep moving. --- ## llms.txt in 2026: The Practical Guide for Marketers _Source: https://citedly.tech/blog/llms-txt-guide · 2026-01-20_ If you've heard "add an llms.txt" from three different consultants and still don't know what the file should contain, this is the guide. ## What llms.txt is [llms.txt](https://llmstxt.org) is a proposed standard: a plain-markdown file at the root of your domain (`/llms.txt`) that describes your site to AI systems. Think of it as a `robots.txt`-sibling — not a permission file, but a *description* file. Where robots.txt says what crawlers may fetch, llms.txt tells language models what your site is and where the important content lives. The companion file, `/llms-full.txt`, optionally carries the full text content of your key pages for deep retrieval. ## The format The spec is deliberately simple: ```markdown # Acme Widgets > Precision widgets for industrial automation since 1998. ## Key pages - [Product catalog](https://acme.example/products): All widget lines with specs - [Integration guide](https://acme.example/docs/integration): How to connect Acme to your PLC - [Company](https://acme.example/about): Who we are, certifications, contact ## Notable content - [2026 price list](https://acme.example/pricing-2026) - [Case studies](https://acme.example/case-studies) ``` The rules that matter: 1. **Start with a `# heading`** — your site/brand name and a one-line description. 2. **Link 3–10 key pages** with one-line descriptions. These are the pages you want engines to know exist. 3. **Keep it under ~100KB.** It's an index, not a dump. Full content belongs in llms-full.txt. 4. **Use absolute URLs** in links. ## What actually makes engines use it Honest answer: adoption is uneven. Some crawlers read it; some don't yet. But there's no cost to having it, and the files that work share three traits: - **They're specific.** "Industrial automation widgets, ISO 9001 certified, 40+ product lines" is useful. "We are a leading provider of solutions" is noise. - **They match the site.** If llms.txt describes a company the site doesn't, engines that cross-check will discount both. - **They're maintained.** A stale llms.txt pointing at deleted pages is worse than none — it's a signal that the site is unmaintained. ## Common mistakes - **Treating it as SEO.** llms.txt does not replace meta descriptions or schema. It complements them. Engines that read it use it as a map, not as your only source of truth. - **Listing everything.** Fifty links dilute the signal. Pick the pages that answer your customers' real questions. - **Writing it once and forgetting.** Update it when your site structure changes. ## A template you can ship today ```markdown # [Company Name] > [One sentence: what you do, for whom, and what makes you distinct.] ## Key pages - [Main product/service](https://yourdomain.com/...): [one-line description] - [How it works / docs](https://yourdomain.com/...): [one-line description] - [Pricing](https://yourdomain.com/...): [one-line description] - [About](https://yourdomain.com/...): [one-line description] ## Resources - [FAQ](https://yourdomain.com/...): [one-line description] - [Contact](https://yourdomain.com/...): [one-line description] ``` ## Check yours in 30 seconds You don't need to guess whether your llms.txt is correct. Citedly's free [llms.txt generator](/tools/llms-generator) fetches your domain, drafts a spec-compliant llms.txt from your real pages, and scores what you currently have — no account, no AI cost. --- ## What Is AI Visibility? The New Metric That Replaced Rankings _Source: https://citedly.tech/blog/what-is-ai-visibility · 2026-01-12_ For two decades, marketing ran on one number: where you ranked on Google. That number is not dead — but it is no longer the whole story. A growing share of high-intent questions now starts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude, and those answers either include your brand or they don't. **AI visibility** is the measure of that: how often AI engines mention your brand, how favourably they describe it, and whether they cite your site as the source. ## Why rankings stopped being enough A Google ranking tells you where you appear on a results page. It says nothing about what a user actually hears. In an AI answer, there is no page two. There is no "click to find out." The answer is the destination — and if your brand isn't in it, you lost the question without a trace in your analytics. Three shifts make this concrete: - **Zero-click is the default.** AI answers don't send users to search results. They synthesise. Your traffic can drop while your brand is still being recommended — or it can hold steady while you quietly lose the recommendation. - **The shortlist is decided in the answer.** For B2B and high-consideration purchases, the AI answer *is* the shortlist. Being cited in "best X for Y" is the new top-of-funnel. - **Engines update on different clocks.** Google re-crawls on its own schedule. AI engines update their knowledge and their sources on theirs. Your position can change between one engine and the next, on different days. ## Mention vs citation: the two signals that matter Not all AI visibility is the same. There are two distinct signals: 1. **Mention** — the engine names your brand in the answer. This is mindshare. It drives search demand and brand recall. 2. **Citation** — the engine links to your site as a source. This is traffic and authority. Citations compound: engines treat cited sources as more reliable, which makes future citations more likely. A brand can be mentioned without being cited (the AI knows you but links to a review site instead) or cited without being mentioned (a source link with no brand in the text). You need to measure both, separately, per engine. ## What drives AI visibility The factors overlap with classic SEO but are weighted differently: - **Entity clarity.** Engines need to know *who you are* unambiguously: consistent name, description, and structured data (schema.org) across your site. - **Question-answering content.** Content that directly answers the questions your customers ask — with specifics, not marketing prose. - **Machine-readable descriptions.** An [llms.txt](https://llmstxt.org) file tells AI crawlers what your site is and which pages matter. - **Crawlability.** If engines can't fetch your pages, they can't cite them. - **Third-party signals.** Reviews, comparisons, and mentions on other cited sites feed the engines' view of your brand. ## How to measure it You can't eyeball this. The practical method: 1. Build a prompt set — the real questions your customers ask, including competitor comparisons. 2. Ask each AI engine those prompts on a schedule (daily for active brands). 3. Record, per answer: was your brand mentioned? cited? what position? what sentiment? 4. Track the deltas over time, and against competitors (share of voice). That's exactly what [Citedly](/) automates. The free audit checks the deterministic factors — llms.txt, schema, entity consistency, crawlability — with zero AI cost, and paid plans add continuous tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude with share-of-voice reporting. ## The bottom line AI visibility is not a vanity metric and it is not a replacement for SEO. It is the next layer of the same job: making sure that when a human asks a machine for help making a decision, the machine knows you, likes you, and points to you. Start by measuring. Run the [free AI visibility audit](/tools/llms-generator) on your domain and see where you stand before you spend a cent on fixing it.