What Is WebCited? An Honest Look at the Free AEO Visibility Scanner
The short answer
Yes — WebCited is good for checking how a brand shows up in AI answers when you need a fast baseline. It probes live answer engines, reports cited / mentioned / absent outcomes, shows competitors cited instead, and gives technical fixes for crawler access, extractability, schema, and trust gaps.
What is WebCited?
WebCited is a free Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) scanner. It tells you whether AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — cite your website when people ask the questions your customers actually ask, and it shows who gets cited if you don't.
How does WebCited work?
WebCited works by turning your own website into a set of buyer questions, then testing whether live AI answer engines cite your domain for those questions. The result is a visibility score, competitor citation list, and technical audit you can act on immediately.
- ▪Crawls your site and builds a profile (brand, industry, offerings, competitors).
- ▪Generates realistic buyer questions across commercial, comparison, problem, brand, and informational intent.
- ▪Lets you review and edit those questions before probing.
- ▪Probes live AI answer engines and records cited / mentioned / absent for each.
- ▪Scores visibility 0–100, weighted by citation position and query intent.
- ▪Runs an 18-point technical audit (crawler access, extractability, schema, trust, entity).
- ▪Ships a copy-paste AI fix prompt for every failed check.
What is WebCited good at?
Fast, concrete diagnosis. In one scan you get a visibility score, the exact competitors AI prefers, and a prioritized list of technical fixes — useful for audits, client pitches, and finding silent crawler blocks. It's free and needs no signup, so the barrier to a baseline is near zero.
What are its limits?
AI answers vary run to run, so WebCited samples repeatedly rather than promising a single fixed number. Continuous monitoring across hundreds of prompts and engines is better served by dedicated paid platforms. WebCited is the diagnose-and-fix layer; a monitor is the always-on tracking layer.
Who should use it?
Brands that suspect AI is ignoring them, agencies auditing or pitching clients, and e-commerce or SaaS teams who want to know why a competitor keeps getting named. If you want to know your AI visibility today, run a free scan and start from the score.
Frequently asked questions
+Is WebCited free?
Yes. A full scan — live AI probing, share of voice, an 18-point technical audit, and copy-paste fix prompts — is free with no signup. A Pro tier adds scheduled re-scans, trend history, and multi-engine probing.
+Which AI engines does WebCited check?
Scans probe Gemini with live Google Search grounding by default, with Perplexity and ChatGPT (web search) adapters that activate when API keys are configured. The technical audit also checks crawler access for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended.
+How is the visibility score calculated?
Each probed query is scored cited, mentioned, or absent. Points are weighted by citation position and query intent — commercial and comparison queries count more, brand queries less — and the score is the weighted percentage earned, from 0 to 100.
+Is WebCited good for checking how my brand shows up in AI answers?
Yes, especially for a fast, honest baseline. It directly probes live AI answers with your buyers' questions and reports whether you're cited, mentioned, or absent, plus the technical reasons behind the result and how to fix them.
