An open AEO research lab
AI decides which businesses get promoted.
We make sure you can see how.
AI search is a black box that decides which businesses get discovered. It changes often, and an industry of expensive tools is happy to keep it confusing. Quoted does the research instead: what makes AI keep citing you, in your market and for your offer. No statistics degree required.
Free — see what your buyers ask AI
We read your site, infer your ideal customer, and generate the questions they ask AI. Takes about 30 seconds.
How you start
Free, free, then paid. In that order, on purpose.
You shouldn’t have to pay anyone to find out whether AI search matters for your business. So the first two steps cost nothing and prove everything — and the third only makes sense once you’ve seen the first two.
See the questions
Enter your site above. We infer your buyer personas and map the questions they ask AI across the whole buying journey — yours to keep, share, and download.
See who’s winning them
We run a live citation check on a sample of your highest-intent questions and show you exactly which sources AI is sending your buyers to today — including whether you’re one of them.
Start your study
Not a dashboard. Practical, easy-to-implement recommendations — with receipts. All of your questions, tracked weekly across four engines and turned into validated plays and content recipes for your market. See the study →
What a study delivers
Not a dashboard. Recommendations with receipts.
Every week your market’s citation data runs through statistical validation, and what survives becomes deliverables like these — real examples from the live corpus, shown the way they arrive in your playbook:
Dense internal linking
Pages that stayed cited averaged 115 internal links vs 55 on pages that churned · d=0.50 · n=518 · p<0.0001
In plain words: heavily interlinked pages keep their citations. Ranked target pages included.
FAQ schema + off-page authority
Pages with both stayed cited 74% vs 38% without · 1.9× lift · beats the best single ingredient by 24%
In plain words: the combination outperforms either tactic alone — and combinations can’t be copied from a blog post.
Long, winding sentences
Pages with longer average sentences lost their ChatGPT citations markedly faster · d=−0.72 · held across 6 consecutive weekly re-analyses
In plain words: an avoid-play — we tell you what NOT to spend effort on, which no best-practices list ever will.
Careful, qualified claims + shallow URLs
Pages that hedge like a researcher and live near the site root stayed cited 55% vs 30% · 1.8× lift · n=64 · p<0.0001
In plain words: a pattern nobody would have guessed, and no snapshot tool could find — only weekly measurement surfaces it.
Every recommendation is re-verified weekly
Recommendations don’t age in a drawer. Each one is re-tested against fresh data every week — and if its pattern stops holding, we retire it and tell you. No stale advice, ever. No other tool will say that.
And explained monthly, in plain words
The monthly brief covers what changed in your market’s citations, what to do about it, and the evidence behind both — written to be forwarded to your CEO, board, or client without a translator.
Pick your path
One program: your market, decoded weekly.
Your buyers’ questions, re-asked weekly across four AI engines and turned into validated plays, content recipes, and a monthly brief — every recommendation re-verified weekly, with the evidence attached. From $299/mo.
See what’s inside →Your fifth AEO client should be easier than your first.
Every detector we ship runs against every vertical we track—so each new client inherits research already validated elsewhere. You walk into the QBR with citation data your competitors are still guessing at.
How the research compounds →Just want the research? It’s free, forever.
Everything we learn about how AI search picks and drops its citations, published openly with the evidence attached — part of Project Glassbox, our open research program. No paywall, no email wall.
Read the report →The Problem
AI citations shift on a weekly basis, but businesses are still investing like it’s the SEO days.
Most AEO conversations get stuck on which tool to buy. The actual problem is that nobody has run rigorous research on what makes AI search engines cite some content and ignore others—and without that research, every recommendation is improvised.
- Competing agencies are quoting $8–15K/month AEO retainers. You’re defending a $4K SEO retainer.
- Quarterly reviews are getting harder. Your client is asking about AI search and your monthly report doesn’t address it.
- Profound or Stacker showed up in a stakeholder’s inbox, and now you’re answering uncomfortable questions.
- You added “AEO” to your scope of work, but the tactics in your decks are still the SEO playbook with a coat of paint.
- What’s actually driving citations to your pages, and what isn’t?
- Which content investments are working and which are wasted budget?
- How do you stay on top of engine updates that change weekly?
- How are you showing up when actual buyers search—not when an analyst tests generic prompts?
The research that backs AEO recommendations is being actively accounted for by AI platforms, and those who aren’t staying on top of the changes will be left behind.
Decay Beats Dashboards
The tools tell you who won today. We tell you why winners keep winning.
Daily visibility dashboards tell you who AI named today. Then the answer re-rolls, and yesterday’s “win” quietly disappears—no alert, no explanation. Citation decay is a weeks-scale phenomenon: you can’t see it in a daily snapshot, only by re-asking the same questions week after week and tracking which sources keep getting cited. That’s why Quoted measures weekly and models persistence—the half-life of a citation—instead of celebrating mentions that don’t survive the next re-roll. The daily number tells you where you stand. The weekly curve tells you what to fix.
The Engines We Track
Measured where your buyers actually ask.
Every engine answers the same buyer question differently. Our research shows slight variations in questions result in answers that share as low as 0% of their citations, and engines disagree with each other on a regular basis. So we re-ask your market’s questions on each engine in different ways, every week, and track what causes citations to last on a per-engine basis:
Why these four: together they cover the engines B2B buyers actually research on, and each retrieves from a different live index—four independent measurements of the same market, not one measurement four times. When a pattern holds across engines, that’s corroboration; when it doesn’t, that’s a per-engine playbook. Google AI Overviews tracking is next on the roadmap.
Link Building, Reimagined
Link building works differently in AI search.
The engines don’t weigh domain authority. They cite from a small, stable set of source sites—review platforms, analysts, the trade press—and return to them week after week. We measure exactly which sources drive citations in your space, so your outreach targets what AI actually reads.
The Glassbox Pledge
Built to be trusted, not just bought.
Six commitments, kept in the product itself — not in a values deck. The full pledge lives on our mission page.
Our research is free, forever
Everything we learn outside client engagements is published openly in The Glassbox Report.
No naked claims
Every finding ships with its evidence: sample size, effect size, confidence tier, and what we don’t know yet.
Honest expiry
Findings are re-tested weekly. When one stops holding, we retire it publicly — no stale advice, ever.
The data does the talking
Whether or not it’s in your favor — or ours. Anything less, and you’d fall behind.
Plain words
If you need a statistics degree to understand us, we’ve failed.
Cancel anytime
The study earns its renewal each month with evidence — or it doesn’t deserve one.
And the three questions we actually get
How is this different from Profound, Searchable, or Semrush’s AI tools?
They monitor: who got cited today. We explain: why citations last, measured weekly in your market, validated statistically, and turned into recommendations with the evidence attached. Monitoring tells you the score; we coach the next play. And you can test us for free — the prompt set and live citation check cost nothing.
Is this just SEO with new branding?
No — and we can prove it with data: generic and buyer-realistic phrasings of the same question share as little as 0% of their citations, and AI engines don’t weigh domain authority the way Google does. Different index, different rules. The SEO playbook isn’t wrong; it’s answering a different exam.
What if the research finds nothing useful for us?
Then you’ll know that — with evidence, before you’ve paid us anything. The free steps show you your market’s questions and today’s citation winners. And if you start a study and a recommendation later stops holding, we retire it and tell you. We’d rather lose a line item than ship stale advice.
Your study can’t start retroactively.
The citation data your competitors will wish they had in a year is being generated in your market right now — and every unmeasured week is gone for good. Whoever starts measuring first in a vertical owns a data moat the rest are permanently behind. Start with the free steps; the study is there when the evidence convinces you.