Find out who AI engines cite when your customers ask about your category
AuditAE runs your prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — and tells you whether your brand gets mentioned, which competitors get the link credit instead, and exactly which pages to fix.
…something faster to adopt and more lightweight, Linear is often a great choice: engineering-friendly workflow with roadmap planning built in. (linear.app)
…speed, flexibility, and GitHub integration — Shortcut and Linear stand out as the best options in 2026 reviews.
The best tools cater to the unique needs of technical teams fostering agility…Recommended: Jira, Shortcut, Asana
Linear is the top choice for high-velocity software engineering; Jira is best for scaling agile teams…
weekly active users now ask ChatGPT instead of opening a search engine
OpenAIqueries a month answered by Perplexity — every one names its sources
Perplexityof commercial Google searches now render an AI Overview above the links
SparkToroSearch Consoles for AI answers — no rank tracker, no inbox alert when you lose a citation
AuditAE methodologyAI engines are answering your customers’ questions. You don’t know what they’re saying about you.
On every AI surface, buyers get a synthesized answer — and in that answer, some brands get named and some don’t. There’s no Search Console for ChatGPT, no rank tracker for Perplexity. If you’re not auditing your own prompt set, you’re guessing about your presence on the surface where more buying decisions are shaped every quarter.
Whether you’re mentioned at all
The floor. Does the engine name you when asked about your product category? If it doesn’t, you’re invisible in the answer the buyer actually reads.
Whether your domain is cited
A bigger gap. Mentioned in the answer body ≠ linked as a source. Most brands pass the first test and fail this one — the link credit goes elsewhere.
Which competitors get the credit
The part that compounds. Engines learn from sources they already cite — every citation your competitor earns is one that gets harder for you to win back.
One prompt set, four engines, one comparable view
You give us a brand, a domain, and the prompts your customers actually type. We run each one the way a real user would — web search on, clean session — capture every answer, extract every source URL, and score each cell.
Start with 5–10 questions your buyers would actually type — full sentences, not keywords. “Best AI citation tool for a B2B SaaS team” beats “AI citation tool.” We surface templates by category if you’re not sure where to start.
Every prompt × engine pair runs in parallel — 5 prompts × 4 engines = 20 checks, about three minutes, $1.00. Results populate a per-cell grid as they arrive. No batch job, no waiting.
A per-prompt grid of cited / mentioned / skipped per engine, a share-of-voice panel against your competitors, and the source list showing which third-party domains the engines route to instead of you. That source list is your content roadmap.
Mentioned in 19 of 20 answers. Cited as a source less than half the time.
That’s the gap AI citation monitoring exists to surface. Yoast shows up in nearly every AI answer about WordPress SEO — but the link credit keeps routing to roundups, Reddit threads, and competitors. Brand visibility looks strong; domain attribution is where the work lives.
Yoast
yoast.comCite share among Yoast and its tracked competitors, across all queried engines.
Every domain the engines referenced — ranked by prompts that cited it. The third-party domains are your content-gap roadmap.
You can rank #1 on Google and still be invisible in AI answers
Most “AEO vs SEO” articles tell you they’re complementary. They’re right — they’re just not honest about the gap. Traditional SEO measures rank position on a list of links. AI citation monitoring measures whether your brand exists inside the synthesized answer — the paragraph the buyer reads before deciding whether to click anything at all.
You can rank #1 in Search Console and have ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity all describe your category without naming you once. Domain authority doesn’t transfer. Backlinks don’t transfer. The corpus an LLM trained on and the links your site has accumulated are two different things.
What moves AI citations: answer-first page structure, named expert quotes, structured data, freshness signals, and unlinked mentions in high-authority sources — Wikipedia, G2, Reddit, mainstream press. The optimization is different. The measurement is different. Track them separately.
The four levers that move AI citation rate — in this order
Run your audit, fix the highest-leverage gaps, re-audit in 30 days. That’s the loop. Here’s where to spend the first cycle.
The first 60 words of every section should directly answer the target query. Engines lift these almost verbatim — Perplexity reflects new content within days. Bury the answer under three paragraphs of context and the engine skips to the source that leads with it.
Google killed FAQ rich results in 2023, but AI engines still consume FAQPage schema — one 2025 audit found 71% of ChatGPT-cited pages used structured data. Question-shaped headings also drive direct answer extraction by AI Overviews.
Pages that quote a specific named source see citation lift in the 30–41% range across multiple published studies. The signal an LLM reads: this is verifiable, this is authoritative.
Pages updated within the last 12 months dominate AI-cited results on commercial queries. Substantive edits + an IndexNow ping = fast re-crawl on Perplexity and Bing. Add a last-updated date — then actually update it.
Pay-per-check. No subscription, no monthly floor.
The other AI citation tools charge by the seat, the domain, or the month — whether or not you ran a single audit. AuditAE bills only when you check: $0.05 per (prompt × engine). A full 5-prompt × 4-engine audit is $1.00.
| Tool | Entry price | Model | Cost · one 5×4 audit | Commitment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AuditAE | $0.05 / check | Pay-as-you-go | $1 | $5 free, no card |
| Otterly Lite | $29 / month | Subscription | $29 | Monthly |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99 / mo / domain | Sub + per-domain | $99 | Monthly |
| Semrush One bundle | $199 / month | Subscription | $199 | Monthly |
| Profound Lite | $499 / month | Subscription | $499 | Monthly |
If you’re running 50 prompts across 200 keywords daily with an enterprise dashboard, Profound earns its price. AuditAE is for everyone else — the SEO running monthly audits, the agency batching client checks, the founder doing this themselves.
Competitor pricing as of February 2026, from each vendor’s published pricing page.
Pay only for the checks you run
An agency tracking 50 prompts across all four engines, weekly. Unused balance never expires; top up when you want.
Built for teams that need an answer, not a dashboard
Answer the CMO
“Are we showing up in AI search?” Walk in with a per-engine breakdown and a share-of-voice screenshot, in about three minutes — not a quarter-long research project.
Set your own margin
Run AI citation audits across your whole client roster. Per-engine breakdowns are report-ready, and per-check pricing means no SaaS markup eating into the deliverable.
Run it tonight
$5 free, no subscription, no sales call. See which competitors ChatGPT recommends instead of you, fix the two or three gaps it surfaces, and re-audit in a month.
“We’re showing up in AI” shouldn’t require a six-figure contract
I’d been doing SEO for years when clients started saying “ChatGPT recommended us!” like it was unambiguously good news — and “why isn’t Perplexity citing us?” the next month. I couldn’t answer either question with confidence.
The tools that could had $499 minimums and were built for enterprise teams running daily monitors. I just wanted to know: does this prompt mention us, and who’s getting the link if not? AuditAE is that. Built it for myself, opened it up because I’m not the only one.
Questions about AI citation monitoring
Want the full methodology and a 30-day setup plan? See the complete AI brand monitoring guide.
What is AI citation monitoring?
Tracking whether AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — name your brand and cite your domain when buyers ask about your category. Unlike rank tracking, it measures presence inside the synthesized answer, not a position on a list of links. The method: keep a fixed prompt set, run it against each engine on a schedule, and record brand mentions and source citations as two separate columns.What's the difference between a brand mention and a citation in AI search?
Mentioned = your brand name appears in the answer text the buyer reads. Cited = the engine included a source URL pointing to your domain. Most AI optimization problems live in the gap between the two: engines know your brand but route the link credit to a third-party review site or a competitor's comparison page. Both metrics matter; neither alone tells the full story.How is this different from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit checks whether you rank in Google's list of links. An AI citation audit checks whether engines cite you in the answer they generate — a different surface, different signals. You can rank #1 and still be absent from every AI answer in your category.Which AI engines does AuditAE check?
ChatGPT (OpenAI Responses API with web search), Perplexity (Sonar models), Google Gemini (Google API), and Google AI Overviews (live SERP capture via SerpAPI). The same four on every audit, so the numbers are directly comparable.How much does an AI citation audit cost?
$0.05 per check — one prompt × one engine. A 5-prompt audit across all four engines is $1.00. New accounts get $5 of free credit, no subscription and no card required.What is an AI citation audit service, and what does it cost?
An AI citation audit service runs your prompt set across the AI engines and scores how often each one mentions and cites you versus competitors. Most are sold as monthly subscriptions; AuditAE runs the same audit pay-per-use at $0.05 per check, with $5 free on signup — far cheaper for monthly or quarterly cadences.How often should I run an audit?
Weekly or biweekly for most programs. Daily creates noise on stable categories; monthly misses too much movement — especially on Perplexity, which reflects new content within days. Run daily for two weeks during a major content rewrite, then return to your normal cadence.What's a good AI citation rate benchmark?
For a tightly category-aligned prompt set, 40–70% is achievable for a well-positioned brand. For broader prompts spanning adjacent categories, 15–30% is realistic. The metric that matters more than your absolute rate: share-of-voice against your top three competitors on the same prompts.Which platforms offer real-time citation tracking across ChatGPT and Perplexity?
AuditAE runs live calls against ChatGPT (OpenAI Responses API with web search) and Perplexity (Sonar) on demand, so each audit reflects what those engines return at run time. You can schedule re-runs to track changes over days or weeks, and the same audit also covers Gemini and Google AI Overviews — directly comparable.What service enables A/B testing of new URLs to see if ChatGPT will cite them for a given query?
AuditAE supports before/after testing: run an audit to capture the baseline, publish or change the URL you want cited, then re-run the same prompts and diff the results to see whether ChatGPT starts citing the new page. It's a sequential before/after test rather than simultaneous A/B, with run-to-run history so the change is auditable.Why doesn't ChatGPT always return source URLs?
OpenAI's Responses API returns URL citation annotations on some calls and not others — model-side behavior we can't control. We capture exactly what the engine returns and flag cells where the source data is incomplete.Do you offer API / programmatic access?
Yes — there's an MCP server (Model Context Protocol) you can wire into Claude Code or any MCP client. Email support@auditae.app for the config.
Run your AI citation audit. See the gap in 3 minutes.
Sign up, add your brand and 5 prompts. AuditAE runs ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews on the same prompt set — every cited source, every competitor named, full share-of-voice panel. $5 free credit covers a full 25-prompt baseline.