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About WebCited

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What is WebCited?

WebCited is a free AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) scanner, launched in June 2026. It measures how visible a website is to AI answer engines by probing live AI answers with the questions that site's customers actually ask.

How does WebCited work?

A scan runs as a seven-stage pipeline. You review the questions before any AI engine is probed, so the score reflects the queries that actually matter to your business.

  1. 01

    Crawl & profile

    Fetches your pages and builds a profile: brand, industry, offerings, audience, and likely competitors.

  2. 02

    Generate questions

    Writes the buyer questions your customers ask AI — across commercial, comparison, problem, brand, and informational intent.

  3. 03

    Review

    You edit, delete, or add questions before anything is probed. These drive the whole score.

  4. 04

    Probe live engines

    Asks live AI answer engines each question, sampling more than once, and records cited / mentioned / absent.

  5. 05

    Score & share of voice

    Weights each result by citation position and query intent, and shows which competitors got cited instead.

  6. 06

    Technical audit

    Runs an 18-point audit: AI crawler access, extractability, structured data, trust, and entity signals.

  7. 07

    Fixes

    Ships a copy-paste AI fix prompt per failed check, and can open a pull request for the mechanical fixes.

Each probed query is scored cited (your domain is in the answer's sources), mentioned (named but not linked), or absent. Points are weighted by citation position and query intent, and the visibility score is the weighted percentage earned, 0–100. Because AI answers vary run to run, each query is sampled more than once for a stable read.

Want the longer version? The blog covers AEO and GEO in depth, including an honest look at what WebCited does.

Why does it exist?

A growing share of buying decisions start with an AI answer, not a results page. Most sites have no idea whether AI engines can read them, let alone cite them — the failure is silent.

Free checkers audit your HTML. Paid monitors track prompts you invent yourself. WebCited closes the gap: it generates your buyers' questions from your own site, asks a live answer engine, and shows who got named — you or a competitor.

Who builds it?

Contact

Questions, bug reports, or a scan result that looks wrong: support@webcited.xyz. We read everything.