What is Outercite?
A plain-English introduction to AI citations, the seven surfaces Outercite monitors, and what the platform does with what it finds.
Outercite tells you whether AI engines name your business when someone asks a question in your category, why they do or do not, and what to change. You ask it in plain language and it answers from your own verified data, with the evidence open beside the answer.
What you'll learn
- What an AI citation is and how it differs from a search ranking
- Which seven surfaces are monitored, and why AI Overviews is not just another chat engine
- What the platform actually does with a citation once it finds one
What is an AI citation?
When someone asks an AI engine a question, the engine writes an answer. Sometimes that answer names a specific business, product or website. That mention is a citation.
A citation is not a position in a list of links. It is a recommendation inside the answer. If someone asks "who is the best accountant in Brisbane for a small business" and the engine replies with two firms and a sentence about each, those two firms have been cited and nobody else was in the conversation. There is no page two.
The prompts Outercite tracks never contain your name. A generic question is asked in your category and location, and whether you appear is the measurement.
The seven surfaces
| Surface | What it is |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | OpenAI's chat engine |
| Claude | Anthropic's chat engine |
| Gemini | Google's chat engine |
| AI Overviews | The AI panel Google draws above its own search results |
| Perplexity | Search-native answer engine |
| Grok | xAI's chat engine, real-time leaning |
| DeepSeek | Open-weights engine, growing share |
Six of those are asked a question and write an answer back. AI Overviews is different in kind: it is read off Google's results page, because that is where it lives. That difference matters when you read your numbers. If Google chooses not to draw an Overview for a prompt on a given day, there is no answer to be cited in, so the check is recorded as an absent panel and left out of the rate rather than counted as a failure to be cited.
Gemini and AI Overviews are both Google, and they are not the same surface. Gemini is the chat model. AI Overviews is the panel on the results page. They are reported separately because they behave differently, and a brand can be strong in one and missing from the other.
Which surfaces are monitored for you depends on your plan. See plans and limits.
What happens to a citation once it is found
- A prompt is asked on each surface your plan covers.
- The answer is read by a judge model, which decides whether your business is genuinely named and, if it is, captures the exact sentence that says so.
- Where the judge is not certain, an independent verifier audits that finding before anything is counted.
- The result is stored with the surface, the date, the sentence, and the sources the answer leaned on.
That last part is what makes the rest of the product possible: every number you see can be opened until you reach the sentence an engine actually wrote. How verification works walks through the pipeline in detail.
What you do with it
- Ask. The assistant is the front door. "Which prompts am I losing, and who is taking them?" is a question, not a report you configure.
- Descend. Every answer opens a panel, and every panel goes down to the evidence: panes and the ladder.
- Change something. The platform proposes changes, you approve them, and then it checks the page itself and re-measures the prompts the change was meant to move. See the Changes lens.
- Prove it moved. A change is not finished when you ship it. It is finished when the answers move, scored against what was captured the day you shipped.
Who is Outercite for?
Organisations are in-house brand, marketing and content teams tracking one business. One workspace is usually enough. Start with the organisation quickstart.
Agencies run many clients under one parent organisation, with an isolated workspace per client, branded reporting and partner pricing. Start with the agency quickstart.
Try this in Outercite
Open the assistant and ask "Is my website ready for AI answers?" The Readiness panel grades your site against the four foundation levels and names the specific thing to fix first.
Related
Why AI search matters
Why being absent from an answer costs more than being on page two ever did.
Meet the assistant
What you land on, what to ask it, and how an answer is put together.
How verification works
The judge, the verifier, and why a citation that is only half clear is not counted.
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Knowledge Base
Guides, playbooks and reference docs for brands and agencies tracking how AI engines cite them across seven monitored surfaces.
Why AI search matters
Buyers ask AI before they open a search engine, and an AI answer names one or two businesses instead of listing ten. Here is what that changes.