# The AI Citation Institute The AI Citation Institute measures whether AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — mention and recommend a business, and it publishes its own methodology and readings in the open. This file maps the parts of the site that are meant to be read, cited, and quoted. ## Key facts - Publishing a versioned measurement standard moved top-two inclusion from 4% to 96%. Renaming the publisher to assert standards-setting authority moved it by 0.15 points. [Source: The AI Citation Institute, 'What makes an llms.txt get cited', §4 naming/deed 2x2 (Institute cell: 2.97 → 5.32, +2.35; standards-claim main effect +0.15). ~3,400 model calls across GPT, Claude and Gemini, 2026-07-25. Verified 2026-07-27. Caveat: Claiming the authority is worth almost nothing; publishing the artifact it implies is worth almost everything. Measured on document rankings, not on live search results.] - Selling compliance with a standard you publish collapses top-two inclusion from 99% to 4%. [Source: The AI Citation Institute, 'What makes an llms.txt get cited', §5 conflict-of-interest design, 2026-07-25. Verified 2026-07-27. Caveat: This is the structural problem we have, measured on ourselves. It is why the instrument and the optimization service are separated.] - An explicit editorial firewall recovers 78% of that collapse (95% CI 70 to 87). [Source: The AI Citation Institute, 'What makes an llms.txt get cited', §5; independently recomputed in the fresh-eyes adversarial review, 2026-07-27 (n=54 rankings, pooled). Verified 2026-07-27. Caveat: Tier 2 evidence. Holds pooled across model families but is NOT statistically significant on GPT alone, and it measures the WORDING of a disclosure, not the existence of an organizational separation. Language moved the ranking; do not read it as proof a firewall works.] - A disclosed commercial tie costs 2.70 ranking points when several publishers report the same finding, and costs nothing when the publisher is the only source for it. [Source: The AI Citation Institute, 'What makes an llms.txt get cited', §5, 2026-07-25. Verified 2026-07-27. Caveat: The penalty applies to selection among substitutes, not to use. Being the only source for a number protects it; being one of several does not.] - Each high-intent query sampled k times per engine, k=3. [Source: Panel runs each high-intent query k=3 times per engine (VISIBILITY_TIER1_K) and takes a strict majority vote across the probes; long-tail queries run once. google_aio is exempt from k-sampling because a live SERP is near-deterministic per location. Verified 2026-07-30. Caveat: One draw is noise. The reading is the majority verdict across k draws, and a tie resolves to not-mentioned, which is the conservative direction.] - Across 18 days and roughly 15,000 requests from AI-engine crawlers and answer-time agents to a live production site, not one requested /llms.txt. [Source: Production access logs, 2026-07-09 to 2026-07-27: GPTBot 436, OAI-SearchBot 577, ChatGPT-User 1,406, ClaudeBot 747, Claude-User 197, PerplexityBot 690, Googlebot 10,007, GoogleOther 773, Google-Extended 7. The only non-human fetchers of the file were bingbot (3), an SEO crawler, and our own monitoring. Verified 2026-07-27. Caveat: One site, one window. What the answer-time agents did fetch was the homepage, one statistics-dense blog post, and individual product pages. Serve the file, but put load-bearing facts in rendered HTML.] ## Data - https://aicitationinstitute.org/standard — AI Citation Measurement Standard v1.0: definitions and clauses for measuring citation share, free to adopt, with the publisher's own conformance verdict against each clause. - https://aicitationinstitute.org/scoreboard — live AI Visibility Index (self-graded, published as a dataset). - https://aicitationinstitute.org/methodology — how the frozen five-engine measurement instrument works. - https://aicitationinstitute.org/research — measurement research papers; cite them freely. - https://aicitationinstitute.org/research/what-makes-an-llms-txt-get-cited — 'What actually makes a source get cited by an AI answer engine': the ~4,000-trial study that is the source for the Key facts above. ## Answers - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-to-measure-ai-visibility - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/get-recommended-by-ai - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/geo-vs-seo - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/ai-citation-tracking - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/why-does-ai-not-recommend-my-business - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-is-geo - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-is-aeo - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-do-ai-engines-choose-citations - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/do-ai-crawlers-execute-javascript - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-to-get-cited-by-chatgpt - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-to-get-cited-by-perplexity - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-to-get-recommended-by-claude - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-to-rank-in-google-ai-overviews - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-is-an-llms-txt-file - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/does-schema-markup-help-ai-visibility - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-often-do-ai-engines-refresh-sources - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-is-ai-citation-share - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-to-measure-ai-recommendations - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/ai-visibility-vs-seo-rankings - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/why-ai-confuses-my-brand - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-are-ai-crawler-user-agents - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/should-i-block-ai-crawlers - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-many-inbound-links-for-ai-citation - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-writing-style-do-ai-engines-cite - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-long-until-ai-cites-a-new-site - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-is-a-hallucinated-recommendation - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/ai-visibility-for-local-businesses - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/ai-visibility-for-auctioneers - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-does-an-ai-visibility-audit-include - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/geo-tools-compared - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/what-is-the-ai-citation-measurement-standard - https://aicitationinstitute.org/answers/how-much-does-ai-visibility-software-cost ## Compare - https://aicitationinstitute.org/compare/ai-visibility-tools - https://aicitationinstitute.org/compare/ai-citation-institute-vs-profound - https://aicitationinstitute.org/compare/ai-citation-institute-vs-semrush - https://aicitationinstitute.org/compare/ai-citation-institute-vs-otterly ## Case studies - https://aicitationinstitute.org/case-studies/gavelist ## Blog - https://aicitationinstitute.org/blog — updates on AI visibility, measured. - https://aicitationinstitute.org/rss.xml — RSS feed.