About Citingly
The first time I noticed
I'd disappeared
A few months back I asked ChatGPT to recommend tools in a category I'd been writing about for two years. My site didn't come up. Not in the recommendation, not in the citations, not as an aside. I asked Perplexity the same question and got a clean answer with five sources, none of them mine. Then I asked Google's AI Overview, which used to send me real traffic, and watched it summarize a competitor's blog post on top of search results that still ranked my page in position three.
That was the moment Citingly started, sitting on my back porch in Oklahoma City with my laptop and the slightly humbling realization that everything I knew about being findable on the internet had a shelf life I hadn't accounted for.
Who I am
I've spent close to twenty years in marketing — healthcare, public media, retail, environmental services. I've run small teams and bigger ones, written code when I needed to, and spent a probably unreasonable amount of time obsessing over why some content gets picked up and some doesn't.
I write at jarredsmith.com, I speak occasionally about AEO and GEO, and I drum, badly but enthusiastically, in my garage. I live in Oklahoma City with my wife Erin and our three kids. I built the first version of Citingly nights and weekends, which is to say my family has been extremely patient about hearing the phrase "schema markup" at dinner.
A note on the philosophy
I wrote a book last year called Explainable, about why AI recommends some brands and ignores others. The shorter version of the argument is that the brands AI surfaces aren't always the biggest or the loudest. They're the ones whose signals are coherent, whose answers are easy for a model to verify, and whose presence on the web reads as legitimate to a system that has to make recommendations in seconds without checking with a human.
That belief is baked into how Citingly works. If you've read the book, the platform will feel like the operational layer of it. If you haven't, the principles are inside the product.
What this is
Citingly is a platform for tracking how AI models cite, reference, and recommend brands. It watches ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google's AI surfaces the way SEO tools used to watch the ten blue links — and it tells you what the models are saying about you, who they're citing instead, and which schema, content, and authority signals are pulling the strings.
It covers four things in one place: AI citations, traditional SEO, GEO (generative engine optimization), and schema — which is quietly becoming one of the most important things on a page nobody looks at.
AI Citations
Who gets named in AI answers, across every major model.
Traditional SEO
The rankings still doing real work — not abandoned, just watched differently.
GEO
Generative engine optimization: the newer discipline that feeds what the models say.
Schema
Structured data that quietly determines whether models can read and trust your content.
Why I built it instead of buying something
I tried. There are tools out there doing parts of this, and a few of them are good. But none of them gave me what I actually needed as a marketer: a single view of how a brand shows up across AI search and traditional search at the same time, with the diagnostic depth to figure out why. Most of what existed was either an SEO tool with an "AI" tab bolted on, or an AI-monitoring tool that ignored the SEO foundation that still feeds the models.
Being cited in AI is downstream of a hundred small decisions — structured data, entity consistency, the publications that mention you, the depth of your topical coverage, the way your site is technically built. You can't fix what you can't see across all of those layers at once. So I started building.
Explainable — the book behind the platform
The platform is the operational layer of the ideas in the book. You can use Citingly without reading it — the principles are baked into the product. But if you want the full argument for why AI citations work the way they do, that's where it lives.
What's next
Citingly is in active development with new features rolling out steadily. If you want to see how your brand is showing up across AI search, the best place to start is the homepage. If you want to talk shop or tell me what's broken, I read every email.
— Jarred