Overview
This guide walks you through everything you need to go from sign-up to your first set of AI visibility results. The entire process takes about 20-30 minutes, most of which is waiting for your audit to complete.
Step 1: Create Your Account
Head to youcited.com and click Get Started. You can sign up with your email address or use Google single sign-on.
Every new account includes a free trial so you can explore the platform and run your first audits before committing to a plan. No credit card is required to get started.
Once you've verified your email, you'll land on the dashboard. It will be empty for now — that changes in the next step.
Step 2: Add Your First Business
Click Add Business from the dashboard. You'll need to provide three things:
- Business Name — The name of your company or brand as you want it tracked in AI responses.
- Website URL — Your primary domain (e.g.,
https://example.com). Cited uses this to identify citations and crawl your content. - Description — A brief summary of what your business does. This helps Cited generate relevant audit questions. Two to three sentences is enough.
You can add multiple businesses to your account later. Agencies typically add one business per client.
Tips for Your Business Profile
Use the exact brand name that customers would search for. If people know you as "Acme" rather than "Acme Solutions International LLC," use "Acme." The description should focus on your core products or services — this directly influences the quality of your audit questions.
Step 3: Scan Your Website
After adding your business, Cited will prompt you to run a website scan. This automated crawl analyzes your site's structure, content, and technical setup.
The scan evaluates:
- Content quality and structure across your pages
- Schema markup and structured data
- Crawlability by AI engines
- Trust signals like authorship, citations, and sourcing
The scan typically takes a few minutes depending on the size of your site. You'll see a progress indicator and can continue setting up while it runs.
Once complete, your Health Metrics dashboard will populate with baseline scores for Content Quality, Crawl Coverage, Trust Score, Schema Completeness, and AI Readiness.
Step 4: Create an Audit Template
An audit template defines what questions Cited will ask AI search engines about your industry. This is where the real insight begins.
Navigate to Audit Templates and click Create Template. You have two options:
- Auto-generate questions — Cited uses your business description to suggest relevant questions that potential customers might ask AI. Review and edit these as needed.
- Write your own — Add custom questions that reflect the specific queries your audience uses. For example, a CRM company might add: "What's the best CRM for small businesses?" or "How do I choose a CRM platform?"
A strong template includes 10-20 questions covering different aspects of your business: product comparisons, industry best practices, buying guides, and how-to queries.
Example Questions
For a project management SaaS company, a good template might include:
- "What are the best project management tools for remote teams?"
- "How do I track project deadlines across multiple teams?"
- "What project management software integrates with Slack?"
- "Compare Asana, Monday, and Trello for enterprise use"
Mix broad industry questions with specific product-comparison queries for the most useful results.
Step 5: Run Your First Audit
With your template ready, click Run Audit. You'll be prompted to select which AI providers to include:
- ChatGPT — OpenAI's conversational AI
- Perplexity — AI-powered research engine with source citations
- Gemini — Google's AI assistant
Select all providers you want to test against. Running across multiple providers gives you a complete picture of your AI visibility since each platform has different source preferences and citation behaviors.
The audit sends your template questions to each selected provider, records the full responses, and analyzes whether your business is mentioned or cited. Depending on the number of questions and providers, this can take 5-15 minutes.
Step 6: Review Your Results
When the audit completes, you'll see results organized by provider and question. For each response, Cited shows:
- Whether your business was cited — Did the AI mention your brand by name or link to your domain?
- Citation context — The exact text where you were (or weren't) referenced.
- Competitors mentioned — Which other businesses appeared in the response.
- Share of Voice — Your presence relative to competitors across all responses.
Your AI Visibility Score will now appear on your dashboard — a composite score from 0 to 100 reflecting how visible your business is across the AI providers you tested.
Generate Recommendations
From your audit results, click Generate Recommendations to get a prioritized list of actions. Each recommendation includes:
- What to do and why it matters
- The expected impact on your visibility
- The estimated effort required
Recommendations might include improving specific content pages, adding structured data, building authority on third-party platforms, or restructuring content for better AI comprehension.
Next Steps
Head to the Action Plan page at /app/workflow to see your recommendations organized by priority. This is your roadmap for improving AI visibility — start with the quick wins (low effort, high impact) and work your way through.
For a deeper understanding of what your scores mean and how they're calculated, read Understanding Your Scores. To learn how to work through your action plan efficiently, see Your First Action Plan.