User Guide

Everything you need to measure, understand, and improve your brand’s AI visibility.

How this page fits with the rest of the documentation

This is a single-page overview of CiteMetrix — what it does, the concepts behind it, and how the pieces fit together. For task-specific guides (“how do I…”), see the Documentation hub. For specific feature questions, see the FAQ.

Contents

Getting Started

CiteMetrix helps you understand how AI platforms — including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot, Mistral, and more — perceive, describe, and cite your brand. The Platform Registry architecture supports unlimited AI platforms, so coverage grows as the landscape evolves.

Whether you’re an SEO professional, brand manager, or agency, CiteMetrix gives you the data you need to optimize for the AI search era.

Get started: citemetrix.com/pricing — plans start at $55/mo with annual discounts.

→ Full guide: Getting Started with CiteMetrix — your first 15 minutes from adding a domain to seeing your first ModelScore.

How CiteMetrix Works

CiteMetrix is built around a four-stage data flow:

1. Scan. On a schedule you control, CiteMetrix queries each AI platform you’ve connected with your tracked questions. You provide the API keys (BYOK); we route the queries through your credentials so your data stays private and your usage is unlimited.

2. Store. Every response is captured — text, citations, mentions, sources, sentiment — and stored in your dashboard with full historical depth. Nothing is summarized away. You can audit any answer from any platform on any day.

3. Analyze. ModelScore™, Share of Voice, sentiment, hallucination flagging, and citation gap analysis all run automatically over the stored responses. The dashboards surface what changed, what’s improving, and what needs attention.

4. Alert. Significant changes trigger notifications — email digests, push notifications via the mobile app, and (for regulated industries) hallucination flags suitable for compliance documentation.

The architecture is intentionally read-only with respect to your website. CiteMetrix never crawls or modifies your site directly — it observes how AI platforms describe you, then routes the findings into actionable reports.

Dashboard Overview

Your CiteMetrix Dashboard is a sidebar-driven workspace. Click any item in the left sidebar to load it in the main panel.

The sidebar is organized into:

  • What’s New + Help & Support — pinned at the top
  • Dashboard — executive overview with ModelScore, quick stats, recent citations
  • Brand Setup — Competitors, Brand Facts, and Queries
  • Analysis — ModelScore, Accuracy, Analytics, AI Crawlers, Brand Perception, Citation Gaps, Experiments, Google AI Overviews, Platforms, Reports, Sentiment, Share of Voice, Source Pages
  • Remediation Tools — built-in tools that connect findings to fixes
  • Settings — domain-level configuration

Account-level settings (API Keys, Team, Security, Billing) are accessible from your account menu in the top-right corner of the dashboard.

CiteMetrix Analyst™

The CiteMetrix Analyst™ is an AI assistant grounded in your scan data. It sits alongside your dashboards as an “Ask the Analyst” panel — click the floating trigger and the Analyst opens with an Instant Brief: a synthesis of what your data says, written for the dashboard you’re on.

What makes it different. The Analyst doesn’t generalize. Every claim is grounded in a snapshot of your actual scans — your share of voice numbers, your top cited URLs, your hallucination counts, your week-over-week deltas. Ask “why is my blog content spiking this week?” and the Analyst reads the actual content-type breakdown and answers from the data.

Where it lives. The Analyst is currently active on six dashboards — ModelScore, Accuracy & Brand Defense, Citation Gaps, Google AI Overviews, Source Pages, and Share of Voice — with rollout to the remaining dashboards in upcoming releases.

How it’s powered. The Analyst uses your Anthropic API key (BYOK). Conversations are tracked per dashboard and per domain so you can resume threads across sessions.

→ Full guide: The Analyst

Brand Setup

Before scans produce useful data, configure three things in Brand Setup:

  • Competitors — who you’re compared against. Used for Share of Voice and head-to-head citation analysis.
  • Brand Facts — verified truths about your brand (pricing, leadership, products, certifications). The Hallucination Detector compares AI responses against these facts; the quality of your fact library determines the quality of your reports.
  • Queries — the questions your customers would ask AI. These are the queries CiteMetrix runs against every connected platform.

→ Full guide: Brand Facts — how to write facts that drive accurate hallucination detection.

ModelScore™

ModelScore™ is CiteMetrix’s proprietary composite metric on a 0–100 scale that summarizes your brand’s overall AI visibility. It’s the single number that answers: “How well do AI platforms know and recommend my brand?”

It’s built from four weighted components:

  • Brand Knowledge Score — how accurately AI describes your brand
  • Positioning Alignment Score — how closely AI’s perception matches your intended positioning
  • Sentiment Score — the overall tone AI uses when discussing your brand
  • Citation Rate — how often AI cites your website as a source

Each scan records ModelScore and all four components, building a trend line that shows whether your optimization is working.

📊 Score ranges

80–100: Excellent — AI platforms know, recommend, and cite your brand consistently.

60–79: Good — solid foundation with room to improve citation rates or positioning.

40–59: Moderate — AI knows your brand exists but descriptions may be incomplete.

0–39: Low — significant gaps; AI either doesn’t know your brand or has wrong information.

→ Full guide: Understanding Your ModelScore

Citation Scans

Citation scans test whether AI platforms cite your website as a source when users ask questions in your industry. Enter target queries and CiteMetrix runs each one across every configured AI platform — checking for citations, brand mentions, source competition, and per-platform behavior differences.

Each query produces a per-platform breakdown: the full AI response, every cited source, and whether your domain appeared. Citation Rate (the percentage of queries where you were cited) is your headline number.

🎯 Choosing effective test queries

Think about the questions your target audience would type into ChatGPT or Perplexity. Focus on queries where being cited as a source would drive qualified traffic: “best [your category] tools,” “how to [solve problem you solve],” “[your industry] recommendations.”

→ Full guide: Citation Scans — how queries are routed, what gets stored, and how to control scan frequency.

Hallucination Detection

AI platforms sometimes fabricate facts about brands — wrong pricing, incorrect product details, outdated leadership, or made-up features. For pharmaceutical companies, financial services, healthcare brands, and other regulated industries, this isn’t just annoying — it’s a compliance risk.

CiteMetrix compares AI responses against your verified Brand Facts. Every factual claim is evaluated and flagged with a severity level (Critical, High, Medium, Low), with the platform where it appeared and a recommended corrective action. The audit log tracks hallucinations over time so you can demonstrate active monitoring to regulators and stakeholders.

⚠ Compliance use case

For regulated industries, the hallucination detection log serves as documentation that your organization is actively monitoring AI representations of your brand. Export the log for inclusion in compliance reports.

→ Full guide: Hallucinations & Remediation

Competition Tracking

CiteMetrix’s competitive analysis surfaces show how AI platforms compare your brand to competitors:

  • Share of Voice — what percentage of AI mentions in your category go to your brand versus competitors, with per-platform breakdowns
  • Citation Gaps — specific queries where competitors are cited and you are not
  • Competitive Scorecard — cross-platform ranking of you and your competitors with trend indicators

Add 3–5 competitors to your Brand Setup for the most useful comparison.

→ Full guide: Competition Tracking

Brand Perception & Sentiment

Beyond whether AI mentions your brand, CiteMetrix tracks how AI describes you:

  • Sentiment — positive, neutral, or negative framing across all responses, with per-platform and per-query breakdowns
  • Brand Perception — attribute-level analysis of which brand qualities AI associates with you (and which competitors get instead)
  • AI Description — verbatim summaries of how each platform would naturally describe your brand

Use these to identify positioning misalignments — places where AI describes you in ways that don’t match your intended brand.

AI Crawl Intelligence

Before an AI model can cite your website, its crawler has to visit and index your pages. AI Crawl Intelligence monitors which AI crawlers are accessing your site, how often, and what they’re indexing.

CiteMetrix tracks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and additional bots from DeepSeek, Meta, Microsoft, and emerging platforms. Status tiles show allowed/blocked state, with fix recommendations for blocked crawlers.

📊 Crawl data as a leading indicator

Crawl frequency often predicts citation changes. If GPTBot starts visiting your pages more frequently, your ChatGPT citations are likely to improve in the coming weeks.

Source Pages

Source Pages tells you which of your URLs AI platforms cite — not just whether you’re cited, but the specific pages doing the work. The dashboard shows your top cited URLs, content-type breakdown (blog, product page, docs, etc.), week-over-week shifts, and per-platform attribution.

This is the surface for content strategy: identify which pages are pulling weight, which content types AI prefers in your category, and where to invest editorial effort.

Site Audit & Content Tools

CiteMetrix includes content and site analysis tools that connect AI visibility findings to specific page-level fixes:

  • AI Content Auditor — citation-likelihood scoring for each page with recommendations
  • Brand Alignment Auditor — crawls your site and identifies misalignments between what your pages say and your intended positioning
  • Site Audit Dashboard — comprehensive multi-tool SEO audit with crawl analysis, on-page SEO, technical health, content scoring, and AI readiness

Every site audit generates a unique share link suitable for clients or stakeholders.

→ Full guide: Technical Readiness — robots.txt, llms.txt, schema markup, and content structure for AI crawlers.

SEO Tools Suite

Beyond AI visibility, CiteMetrix includes a full suite of professional SEO tools integrated directly into your dashboard, organized across categories:

  • Content Strategy — Brief Generator, Gap Analysis, Optimizer, Outline Creator, Refresh Advisor
  • Technical SEO — On-Page SEO, Schema Generator & Advisor, Core Web Vitals, Crawl Checker, Robots Analyzer
  • Link Building — Link Prospect Finder, Outreach Email Generator, HARO Response Generator, Domain Finder
  • Keyword Research — Keyword Suggest, PAA Expander, NLP Extractor, N-Grams Extractor, Entity Extractor
  • Competitive Intelligence — Competitor Content Audit, SERP Analyzer, Share of Voice Calculator
  • Local SEO — Local Business Audit, GBP Post Generator, Local Competitor Analyzer

Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK)

CiteMetrix uses a Bring Your Own Key architecture across all AI platforms. When you provide your own API keys, scans go directly through those APIs with no per-prompt fees from CiteMetrix. This gives you unlimited scanning at your own API cost — typically $2–5 per month total across all platforms.

BYOK is available for every supported AI platform, plus any custom platforms you add via the Platform Registry. Keys are encrypted at rest and never shared.

💰 Cost advantage

Because CiteMetrix never touches your API costs, our subscription margins stay predictable regardless of how many scans you run. Several supported platforms offer free tiers that cover typical CiteMetrix usage.

→ Full guide: API Keys (BYOK) — where to get each provider’s key and the pricing reality of running scans.

Platform Registry

The Platform Registry is CiteMetrix’s architecture for supporting unlimited AI platforms. CiteMetrix ships with built-in platform definitions for the major AI systems, and any AI platform with an OpenAI-compatible API can be added as a custom platform.

See the Platform Registry in your dashboard settings for the current list of built-in and custom platforms.

🚀 Why this matters

New AI platforms are launching constantly. The Platform Registry means CiteMetrix is never limited to a fixed set. As new AI systems gain market share, you can add them immediately without waiting for a CiteMetrix update.

Mobile App (PWA)

CiteMetrix includes a Progressive Web App for iOS and Android. Install it from your phone’s browser (Add to Home Screen on iOS, Install App on Android), and you get:

  • Push notifications for ModelScore changes, hallucination alerts, BYOK key health issues, and digest summaries
  • The CiteMetrix Analyst on every supported dashboard, working from your phone
  • Offline-capable dashboard views for in-meeting reference

The PWA uses the same login as the web dashboard — no separate account required.

→ Full guide: Mobile App (PWA) — install, push notification setup, and the Analyst on mobile.

Reports

CiteMetrix includes four professional report types generated from the Reports page:

  • AI Visibility Report — point-in-time snapshot of your current ModelScore, citation rates, and top queries
  • Monthly Progress Report — period-over-period comparison for client retainers and ROI justification
  • Competitive Intelligence Report — head-to-head competitor analysis with platform-level gaps
  • Content Opportunity Report — uncited queries and citation gaps ranked by priority

Agency and Enterprise subscribers can generate white-label reports without CiteMetrix branding.

→ Full guide: Reports & Digests

Alerts & Digests

Stay informed about changes to your AI visibility without logging into the dashboard every day:

  • Score Change Alerts — email when your ModelScore shifts beyond a threshold you set (3+, 5+, or 10+ points)
  • Weekly Digest — summary email with your current ModelScore, total citations, notable changes, and competitor activity. Choose your delivery day.
  • Push Notifications — via the PWA, for real-time alerting on hallucinations, score changes, and BYOK key health issues

Alert email addresses can be set per-domain — useful for routing notifications to a shared team inbox or directly to a client contact.

Account, Team & Billing

CiteMetrix organizes your work into a Client > Profile hierarchy. A Client represents a company; each Client can have multiple Brand Profiles (different product lines, regional brands, or divisions).

Team management supports four roles — Owner, Admin, Analyst, and Viewer — with per-domain access controls, useful for agencies giving clients read-only access to specific domains. Account ownership can be transferred to a team Admin through a verified email process.

Two-factor authentication (TOTP-based, compatible with Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password, Microsoft Authenticator, and any other RFC 6238 app) is available on all accounts and can be enforced for all team members by the Owner.

→ Full guide: Account & Team Settings

Google Integrations

CiteMetrix integrates with Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to enrich your visibility data with real search performance metrics. We request only the webmasters.readonly scope — read-only access to your search performance data with no ability to modify anything in your account.

🔒 Privacy note

CiteMetrix adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including Limited Use requirements. We never sell Google data, use it for advertising, or train AI models with it. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

→ Full guide: Google Integrations

Plans & Pricing

CiteMetrix offers tiered subscriptions for individual consultants through enterprise organizations, with annual billing available at a discount equivalent to two months free. All plans use BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) — you supply your own AI API keys for unlimited scanning at your own API cost, keeping your data private and your costs transparent.

→ See current plans and pricing: citemetrix.com/pricing

Key Concepts

Mention vs. citation

A mention is when an AI platform references your brand name in its response text. A citation is when the AI explicitly links to your website as a source. Citations are more valuable because they can drive direct referral traffic and signal to the AI model that your content is authoritative.

Why CiteMetrix doesn’t affect your website

CiteMetrix is a monitoring and analysis platform. It queries AI platforms on your behalf and analyzes how they describe your brand — it never modifies your website, submits anything to search engines, or makes changes to your pages.

The role of llms.txt

This is an emerging standard (similar to robots.txt) that tells AI crawlers how to interpret your site, what to cite, and how to attribute your content. CiteMetrix includes an LLM Text Generator that produces a configured llms.txt file you can upload to your site root.

Support & Contact

For bug reports or feature requests, email support with a description and screenshots if possible.

Ready to see your AI visibility?

Get started with CiteMetrix in 15 minutes — add a domain, run your first scan, and see your ModelScore.

View Plans & Pricing