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What is Outercite?

A plain-English introduction to AI search citations, the six engines Outercite tracks, and who the platform is for.

Outercite is an AI search visibility platform. It tracks when, where, and how AI search engines mention your business, verifies every mention with a two-model pipeline, and tells you what to do next to improve your presence.

What you'll learn

  • What an AI search citation is and how it differs from a Google ranking
  • Which six engines Outercite monitors and why the spread matters
  • Who uses Outercite and what they get out of it

What is an AI search citation?

When someone asks an AI search engine a question, the engine writes a direct answer. Sometimes that answer names a specific business, product, or brand. That mention is called a citation.

A citation is not a link in a list of results. It is a recommendation baked into the answer itself. If someone asks "What is the best accountant in Brisbane?" and the AI replies "Smith and Co. Accountants is well regarded for small business tax...", that is a citation for Smith and Co.

Outercite checks every prompt across all six major AI engines and verifies each citation with two independent models. Across the prompts we track, brands are cited in about half of all checks (a 48% aggregate citation rate), with a visibility score of 74 out of 100.

The six engines Outercite tracks

Not all AI engines cite businesses at the same rate. Outercite monitors six engines simultaneously, because your visibility can look very different depending on which engine a customer uses.

EngineCitation rate
Perplexity58%
Grok53%
ChatGPT51%
Claude47%
DeepSeek42%
Google AI38%

Perplexity is the most generous citer; Google AI is the hardest to win. A brand that performs well on one engine can be nearly absent on another. Tracking all six gives you the full picture.

These figures are aggregates across all tracked accounts. Your own citation rate will vary based on your industry, the prompts you track, and how well your content is optimised for AI search.

The verification pipeline at a glance

Raw AI responses cannot be trusted at face value. A model might hallucinate a mention or count a passing reference as a meaningful citation. Outercite uses a four-stage verification pipeline to make sure every citation in your dashboard is real.

  1. Every prompt is classified by intent type (for example, local, buying-intent, informational, comparison, and branded queries).
  2. A high-performance model reads the full AI response and identifies every business mentioned.
  3. A second model independently audits those findings.
  4. Only citations that both models agree on are counted. This is what keeps false positives near zero.

The output of that process is a confidence score: a number that reflects how certain the pipeline is about each citation. You can read a full walkthrough in How the Pipeline Works.

What can Outercite tell you?

Once the pipeline has processed your keywords, your dashboard shows you:

  • Citation rate: the percentage of checks where your brand appeared in the answer
  • Visibility score: a composite 0-100 score based on citation rate, position, and consistency
  • Share of voice: how much of the total citation space your brand owns compared to competitors
  • Competitor threat score: how aggressively a competitor is capturing citations in your space
  • Predictions and forecasts: where your citation rate is likely to go over the next 30-90 days
  • Surge alerts: notifications when citation activity spikes or drops significantly

The glossary defines every metric in plain English. It is a good page to bookmark.

Who is Outercite for?

Organisations are in-house marketing and brand teams that want to track their own AI search presence. A single workspace is usually enough. They use Outercite to monitor keywords, track competitors, and get actionable recommendations from the weekly brief.

Agencies manage multiple clients under a parent organisation. Each client gets its own workspace. Agencies get access to a portfolio view, white-label reports, and wholesale pricing. The agency quickstart covers all of this in detail.

If you are not sure which track applies to you, the knowledge base landing page has a one-paragraph summary of each.

Try this in Outercite

The fastest way to understand citations is to see your own. Start the onboarding walkthrough and Outercite will run your brand through all six engines.

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