First steps
6 min readGetting Started with Cited
Cited measures how AI engines answer your buyers' questions, shows you why competitors win recommendations you lose, and drafts the content that closes the gap. This guide takes you from a new account to your first completed audit. You need your website domain and about five minutes; the audit itself runs in the background.
Create your account
Sign up at citedintel.com/start with your work email or Google account. No credit card is needed: the Free plan includes two full audits, enough to baseline your brand and re-check it after your first fixes.
Set up your first project
A project is one brand on one domain. Enter your website and Cited reads it to understand what you sell, who you sell it to, and which category you compete in. Onboarding then walks you through two review steps before anything runs:
- Competitors: Cited suggests the brands it expects to meet in your category's AI answers. Add or remove any of them. You are never limited to this list in results: if an engine recommends a brand you did not enter, it still shows up in your category benchmark.
- Buyer-intent prompts: Cited generates the questions your buyers actually ask AI engines, spread across personas and funnel stages: discovery, comparison and switching. Review them, edit any that miss your market, and confirm.
Take the two review steps seriously
The audit measures whatever the prompts ask. Two minutes spent making prompts sound like your real buyers pays back on every audit after.
Run your first audit
Confirm the setup and the audit starts. Cited asks each AI engine your buyer-intent prompts, stores every answer verbatim, and extracts who was recommended, in what order, with what framing and which sources. You can watch progress live, including your position in the queue, or close the tab: the run continues in the background and the dashboard opens when it completes.
Free and Starter audits cover ChatGPT and Perplexity. Pro adds Claude. Enterprise extends coverage to 10+ engines including Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode.
Read your first results
The dashboard opens on your category leaderboard: AI share of voice for you and every brand the engines named, ranked. Three questions to answer on your first read:
- Where do you stand: Your share of voice against the category. A low number on your first audit is normal; it is the baseline every later fix gets measured against.
- Who wins instead: Open any prompt to read the full engine answer and see which brands took the recommendation, in what order.
- Why they win: The Understand tab explains each lost recommendation in plain language: a content gap, an off-site venue you are absent from, or a technical issue on your site.
What your first week looks like
Teams that get value fast run the same sequence. Done by hand, this sequence is roughly a week of analyst work: collecting answers engine by engine, diffing competitor positioning, tracing sources, writing briefs. Inside Cited it is one audit plus about 20 minutes of review at each step:
- Day 1: baseline: First audit done, leaderboard read, biggest loss identified. Run a readiness scan the same day: technical failures cap everything else.
- Day 2-3: first fix: Open the Act tab, take the top item, edit the draft into your voice, publish it through your normal review.
- Day 4-7: verify: Run the second free audit after the fix is live and crawlable. Compare against the baseline. You now have a before-and-after, which is the artifact that unlocks budget.