The latest articles on DEV Community by CitePack (@citepack). https://dev.to/citepack https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4012620%2Fb88fb24a-1c36-4d60-848b-255f7866104a.png https://dev.to/citepack en CitePack Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:11:43 +0000 https://dev.to/citepack/i-built-an-ai-citation-checker-two-of-four-engines-think-its-a-python-module-23hf https://dev.to/citepack/i-built-an-ai-citation-checker-two-of-four-engines-think-its-a-python-module-23hf <p>To check whether an AI engine cites your brand, ask each engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's Gemini) your top buyer question, then look at whether your domain appears in the sources it used to answer. They disagree constantly. I run this probe on my own company every week, and this week two of the four didn't even know my company is a company.</p> <p>Here's the unedited board for "What is CitePack?" on 16 July 2026:</p> <ul> <li>Perplexity: cites us. Correct.</li> <li>Google (Gemini): cites us. Correct.</li> <li>ChatGPT: describes a Python module that doesn't exist.</li> <li>Claude: describes the wrong entity entirely.</li> </ul> <p>Two out of four. And on the query that actually converts, "best tool to check if AI cites my site," I'm cited by none of them. The engines name Frase, Semrush, and a Reddit thread. Not me.</p> <h2> Why two engines cite us and two don't </h2> <p>The split isn't random. Perplexity and Gemini retrieve live from the web at answer time, so they picked up the entity signals we've published — the site, the LinkedIn company page, the structured data. ChatGPT and Claude lean more heavily on training data and weaker retrieval, so when they hit an unfamiliar name like "CitePack," they pattern-match: "Cite" + "Pack" sounds like a developer tool, so they invent one.</p> <p>The core lesson: getting cited by AI is mostly an entity-recognition problem, not a content problem. If the engine doesn't know who you are, no amount of great content earns the citation, because it can't attribute it to you.</p> <h2> The fix (the same one I sell) </h2> <p>There's no trick here, and nothing that coerces a model. You make the real entity unmissable:</p> <ol> <li>A single, factual knowledge-base anchor (a Wikidata item) that feeds Google's Knowledge Graph and the retrieval layer the other engines lean on.</li> <li>Consistent, claimed profiles that corroborate each other (Crunchbase, Product Hunt, G2, LinkedIn), all describing the same entity the same way.</li> <li>Answer-first pages on the exact questions buyers ask, structured so the engine can lift a clean, attributable answer.</li> </ol> <p>Then you re-probe, and you watch ChatGPT flip from "Python module" to "the company." That flip is the receipt.</p> <h2> Why I'm showing you the misses </h2> <p>Because a citation you can't prove is just a claim. The product I'm building, CitePack, exists to end that: it measures whether the engines cite you, ships the deploy-ready fix, then re-tests the real engines and hands you the dated before → after. If I won't run that loop on myself in public, including the 0/4, I have no business selling it.</p> <p>So consider this the "before." I re-probe on 17 July and publish the "after," whichever way it goes.</p> <p>If you want to see your own four-engine board, the scan is free at citepack.com. It'll probably surprise you which engines already cite you, and which think you're something you're not.</p> buildinpublic ai saas seo