Frequently asked questions

The questions people actually ask in their first month, with short answers and a link to the long one.

The basics

What does Outercite measure? Whether AI engines name your business in answers to questions in your category. Your own name is never in the prompt. See what is Outercite.

Which surfaces? Seven: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek. AI Overviews is Google's results-page panel and behaves differently from the chat engines. Coverage depends on your plan.

Is this SEO? No. A page can be the top search result and never be quoted, and a page nobody links to can be quoted constantly. See why AI search matters.

Do I have to use the assistant? No, every lens has a full page, but the assistant is the fastest route to an answer and it opens the evidence beside it.

The numbers

Why is an engine excluded instead of zero? Because nothing it returned could be bound to a source, so there is no measurement. Zero means it answered and did not name you. See when a number is missing.

Why is my rate lower than when I search manually? Because a text search counts appearances and this counts recommendations. See why fewer citations.

What is a good citation rate? There is no published benchmark worth acting on, and we do not publish one. Judge yourself on movement, on your buying and comparison prompts specifically, and on your share against the rivals you actually lose to.

Why does one citation have no sentence quoted? Because it was established by evidence a sentence cannot show: your URL, your phone number, or a product of yours named without your company name. See Proof.

Verification

Do two models check everything? A judge reads every answer. An independent verifier audits the ones the judge is not certain about. A disagreement means the citation is not counted, and a check the judge decided alone is labelled as such. See how verification works.

Does being mentioned always count? No. An answer that names you in order to warn readers off is recorded as a negative mention, not as a citation.

Setup and operations

How many prompts should I start with? About fifteen, weighted towards buying and comparison. See your first prompts.

How often is everything checked? On your plan's cadence, per surface. The assistant reads the stored results, so answers arrive with dates attached.

Why is there nothing in my account yet? Usually because the first cycle has not finished, or no prompts are active. See why is there no data yet.

Can I see what AI actually said? Yes, verbatim, with the surface and the date. Ask "Show me the exact sentences AI wrote about us."

Plans, agencies and billing

What do agencies pay? Scale at the partner price, with clients as workspaces rather than seats. See partner pricing.

What happens when coverage runs out? Monitoring pauses and you are told, rather than quietly degrading. See coverage and credits.

Can clients see each other? No. Separation is enforced where the data is read. See data isolation.

Still stuck

See contact support.

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