How Cite.me.in Was Born: From Rentail to LLM Citation Monitoring

Cite.me.in started with a simple, nagging question: is ChatGPT citing Rentail?

I'm building Rentail—a platform that helps specialty retailers find temporary space in shopping centers. The SEO was solid. Google ranked us well. But something felt off. More and more users were saying they found us through ChatGPT or Perplexity. And I had no idea whether that was accurate, consistent, or growing.

The Question Nobody Could Answer

When you search for "temporary retail space" on Google, you can see exactly where you rank. Position 3. Position 12. You know.

When ChatGPT answers the same question, you get nothing. No rankings. No impressions. No click-through data. Just a black box.

I started asking around. Did anyone track this? A few services claimed to, but they were either expensive enterprise tools aimed at brand monitoring agencies or manual audits that checked maybe 20 queries per month. Nothing automated. Nothing built for a solo founder who wanted to understand their actual AI citation footprint.

Building the First Version

So I built it myself. A quick script that ran a set of search queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity—with web search enabled—and logged every URL that appeared in citations.

The results were immediately interesting. Rentail was cited on some queries and completely absent on others that seemed equally relevant. The platforms didn't agree with each other. Perplexity cited us frequently. Claude barely mentioned us. ChatGPT was inconsistent by the day.

That inconsistency was the insight. LLM citation visibility isn't static. It shifts. And if you're not measuring it, you're blind to it.

Why This Became Its Own Product

I ran that script for a few weeks and realized two things:

1. The data was genuinely valuable—it changed how I thought about content for Rentail
2. Every other domain owner needed the same thing and had no way to get it

LLMs are now a primary research tool for millions of people. When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a product, a service, or an expert—those citations are referrals. They drive real traffic and real conversions. But unlike Google, there's no Search Console for AI.

Cite.me.in is that Search Console.

What It Tracks

Cite.me.in queries the major AI platforms on a regular schedule with a set of search queries relevant to your domain. It records every citation—every time an AI platform links to or mentions your site in a response. Over time, you see:

• Which platforms cite you most
• Which queries trigger citations
• How your visibility changes week over week
• Where competitors appear instead of you

The goal isn't to game the LLMs. It's to understand them. To make informed decisions about content, positioning, and outreach based on actual citation data rather than guesswork.

From Side Project to Standalone Tool

Moving Cite.me.in from a Rentail debugging script into its own product was mostly about making it reliable and reusable. The core insight—query AI platforms with forced web search, extract citations, store them—stayed the same. What changed was wrapping it in proper infrastructure: scheduled runs, a database, a dashboard, and support for multiple domains and multiple users.

The tech stack is intentionally boring: React Router, Postgres, Prisma, and the Vercel AI SDK to talk to the LLMs. Reliability matters more than novelty here.

If you're building a brand online and you're not tracking your LLM citation visibility, you're flying blind. Sign up and start monitoring—the free plan covers the basics, and you'll have real data within the first run.

FAQ

What is LLM citation visibility?

LLM citation visibility measures how often and where AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cite or reference your website in their responses. When an AI cites you, it's effectively a referral—and Cite.me.in tracks those referrals automatically.

How is this different from SEO?

Traditional SEO tracks your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). LLM citation visibility tracks whether AI platforms mention you when answering questions. The mechanisms are different, the signals are different, and the tools needed are different. Cite.me.in focuses on the AI side.

Which AI platforms does Cite.me.in monitor?

Cite.me.in monitors ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Perplexity. All queries use web search mode to ensure citations reflect current web content.

How often does Cite.me.in check for citations?

Cite.me.in runs queries daily, with idempotent checks that skip re-running if results already exist for that time window. This gives you a consistent, comparable dataset over time.