EST. MMXXVI · THE INSTITUTION OF RECORD FOR AI CITATION · OPEN METHODOLOGY
THE AI CITATION INSTITUTEEx corpore, auctoritas.the blog
AI visibility, measured.
Findings from our own runs — not folklore. Every number here comes from a panel we can point you at, with the caveats attached.
- 10 min read
We asked four consumer AI assistants about our own company. Google quoted our honesty back to us; Gemini couldn't find us and filed us under 'link networks or prompt injection.'
On 2026-08-08 we ran the same six questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google — the surfaces real buyers use, not our measurement API. Google's AI Overview praised our published honesty verbatim eight days after launch. Consumer Gemini could not find us and grouped us with 'link networks or simple prompt injection.' Here are all the receipts, including the ones that hurt.
read the finding → - 11 min read
We published all 37 measurements we ever took of our own visibility — including the ones that went down, the parser bug, and the re-scores.
For fifteen weeks we have measured one business — our own auction-software product — on the same AI-visibility instrument we sell. Here is the entire run ledger: every completed scan, the two that failed, the week a parser bug inflated a number, the platform shifts that moved every brand at once, and how we handle a panel that keeps growing. Nothing retouched.
read the finding → - 7 min read
We tried to archive a competitor's website. The Internet Archive recorded a 404 five times, while the page loaded fine for everyone else.
On 2026-08-08 the Internet Archive held zero snapshots of listerleo.com for the domain's entire lifetime. We asked it to save five URLs; each capture recorded a 404, while the same URLs served a normal 200 page to every user agent we tested. Here is the trace, the method, and what would overturn it.
read the finding → - 8 min read
We audited every page AI assistants cite about our own industry. Most of their numbers have no source.
AI answers about AI-visibility tools are built from about 19 comparison articles. We audited the ten most-cited: roughly one in four of their statistics carries any source, and about 3% of third-party listicle claims trace to a primary source. Here is the data, our own pages included.
read the finding → - 9 min read
AI already knows who you are. It will not volunteer you.
Across nine businesses on our frozen five-engine panel, AI assistants named them in nearly 100% of answers when asked by name, and volunteered them in as few as 0% of category answers. The gap between those two numbers is the whole game.
read the finding → - 3 min read
Introducing The AI Citation Institute: we measured ourselves at zero, and published it
The AI Citation Institute measures whether AI assistants recommend a business — and on day one, on our own panel, we appeared in 0.0% of the answers. Here's what we measure, and why we published our own zero.
read the finding → - 4 min read
The one on-page lever that moved AI citations the most: internal links
We audited all 91 of our own blog posts across four AI engines. The pages nobody linked to internally were cited almost never. The pages with ten or more inbound links were cited about 44% of the time.
read the finding →