Knowledge Base

Guides, playbooks and reference docs for brands and agencies tracking how AI engines cite them across seven monitored surfaces.

This is the knowledge base for everyone using Outercite to find out whether AI engines name their business, why they do or do not, and what to change. Every article is written against the product as it ships, in the same words the app uses, and ends with a link into the thing it describes.

What you'll learn

What an AI citation is, and which surfaces Outercite watches
How to ask the assistant a question and read the panel it opens
Where to go next, whether you run one brand or fifty client workspaces

Start with the shape of the product

You do not open a dashboard and hunt for a number. You land on the assistant, ask it something in your own words, and it answers from your own data with a panel of evidence beside it. Everything else in the platform is a lens on that same evidence.

Introduction

What AI citations are, why they decide who gets considered, and how Outercite verifies one.

Using the assistant

The questions that work, how an answer is grounded, and how to descend a panel to the proof.

The lenses

One article per lens: Prompts, Competitors, Changes, Sources, Proof, Platforms, Readiness and the rest.

Then pick your track

For organisations

In-house brand and marketing teams tracking one business. Setup, prompts, competitors, changes and reports.

For agencies

Multi-client work: a parent organisation, one isolated workspace per client, branded reporting and partner pricing.

What Outercite watches

Seven surfaces, not one. Six are chat engines that get asked a question: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek. The seventh is Google's AI Overviews, the panel Google draws at the top of its own results page, which is read from the results page rather than asked anything.

Your coverage depends on your plan, and the spread between surfaces is usually wider than people expect. A business that reads well on one engine can be absent from another, which is the reason the platform reports each surface separately instead of averaging them into one number.

What is AEO?

AEO stands for answer engine optimisation: shaping your site and your content so that AI engines have something to quote when they answer a question in your category. It is not SEO with a new name. A page can be the first organic result and never get quoted, and a page nobody links to can be quoted constantly. The glossary has the full definition.

A note on the numbers in this knowledge base

You will not find an industry-wide citation rate here, or a table of per-engine averages. Nothing in the product produces those figures, so publishing them would mean inventing them. Every number you act on should be your own workspace's, which is what the assistant answers with.