How can we help?

• Sign in at app.citationrocket.com with the same email you used to buy.
• Create an OpenRouter account and add a small amount of credit, such as $5.
• Create a key with a spending limit and paste it into Settings.
• Type your website on the dashboard, check the business details, and run the audit.

The audit takes about 1 to 2 minutes. Then open the Playbook and start with the first fix.

If you bought on citationrocket.com, sign in with the email you used at checkout and it activates by itself. Email sign-ups need to verify their email first.

If you have a licence code from a marketplace or partner, enter it on the dashboard or in Settings, under License. One licence per account, and codes do not stack.

Check these in order:

• Are you signed in with the same email you used at checkout? A different email will not match.
• If you signed up with email and password, have you verified your email?
• Did your payment finish? Your invoice email from Dodo Payments confirms it.

Still stuck? Email support@citationrocket.com with your order email and we will fix it.

OpenRouter is a website where you pay for AI as you use it, a bit like a prepaid phone card. There is no monthly fee. One account reaches AI models from all the big companies.

You need it because Citation Rocket uses AI for parts of your report. Your licence pays for the software. The AI runs on your own OpenRouter credit at their prices, and we add nothing on top. That is why there are no credits to buy from us and no monthly bill.

A key is a private code that lets Citation Rocket use your OpenRouter credit. You only do this once.

• Go to openrouter.ai and create an account.
• Open Credits and press Add credits. $5 is plenty to start. OpenRouter charges 5.5 percent on credit purchases, with a $0.80 minimum fee.
• Open API keys and press New key.
• Under Name, type Citation Rocket.
• Under Expiration, choose No expiration, or 1 year if you prefer.
• Under Credit limit, choose Custom amount and type 5. Then a mistake can never cost more than $5. You can raise it later.
• Press Create, and copy the key straight away. It starts with sk-or-v1.
• In Citation Rocket, open Settings, paste the key under OpenRouter key, and save.

We check the key with OpenRouter and store it encrypted. We never show it again, so keep your own copy somewhere safe if you need one.

Measured on 5 November 2026 with the default models:

• One audit: under 1 cent.
• A live check on Perplexity alone: about 5 cents.
• A live check on all five engines: about 80 cents. The app showed an estimate of 93 cents first, and we measured 78 and 80 cents on real runs.
• Writing more topic ideas: under 1 cent.

You always see the estimate before a check runs. Prices belong to OpenRouter and can change. OpenRouter says unused credits may expire after one year, so top up small amounts.

It is stored encrypted, and the encryption key is held outside our database. We keep only the last 4 characters so you can see which key is saved. It is never sent back to your browser, and it is only used for actions you start.

Use a key made just for this tool, with a spending limit. You can replace or remove it in Settings at any time.

An invite link gives you a free licence and a trial AI key with a small spending cap, paid for by Citation Rocket. You can see how much is left in Settings.

When the trial credit runs out, your licence stays. Add your own OpenRouter key in Settings to keep auditing. Your own key replaces the trial key.

AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It means making your website easy for AI tools such as ChatGPT to find, understand and mention. AI visibility is how often those tools mention you when people ask questions. SEO does the same job for Google's list of links.

An AI tool names you or links to you in its answer. If someone asks "What is the best payroll tool?" and the answer mentions your business, you were cited.

The AI service that writes the answer, such as GPT (behind ChatGPT), Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Grok. Each can give a different answer to the same question.

A private code that lets one piece of software use another on your behalf. Your OpenRouter key lets Citation Rocket use your AI credit. Treat it like a password, and give it a spending limit.

A program that visits websites and reads them. Google has one, and so do the AI companies. If a crawler cannot read your site, that company's AI search cannot use it.

A small text file at the top level of your website, at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. It tells crawlers which parts of your site they may read. You can open yours in a browser.

Hidden labels in a page's code that tell software what the page is about, such as "this is a company" or "these are questions and answers". Visitors do not see them. They make your facts easier for machines to read.

A plain text file at the top level of your website that summarises your site and links to your key pages, for any AI tool that chooses to read it. It is a newer idea, and not every AI company uses it.

A file that lists the pages on your website, so software can find them. It usually lives at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Most website builders create one for you.

We read your homepage and suggest your name, industry, audience and keywords. You check them because they shape your score targets, your topic ideas and the questions asked in the live check. Better details give you a better report.

Industry is the one field you must fill in. We try to work it out from your homepage, but if we cannot, the box stays empty and a red note appears above the button.

Type your industry in the box and the button turns on. The other fields can stay blank, but filling them in gives you a better report.

Be specific, the way a customer would describe you. "B2B payroll software" works much better than "software". "Personal injury law firm" works much better than "services".

The industry sets the reference targets in your score. A restaurant is not expected to publish tutorials like a software company, for example.

They point the topic ideas and live check questions at what you really sell. Up to 8 are used. Choose the words customers use, not your internal product names. They do not change your score.

No. We do not guess them. Type up to 3 competitors you care about before the audit runs and the report will compare you with them. If you skip this, that section does not appear.

The live check also shows who AI named instead of you, so it often reveals competitors you did not know about.

About 1 to 2 minutes. You can leave the page open and wait. Our test on 5 November 2026 took about 80 seconds. A live check on all five engines took just under 2 minutes, and a check on one engine is faster.

Up to 10 pages: your homepage, common pages such as pricing, about, FAQ and blog, and the richest pages in your sitemap. We also read your sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt.

We keep short excerpts to build your AEO Pack, not whole pages. The full method is on the methodology page.

Yes. You can audit any public website. There is no limit on how many different domains you audit, only on how many audits you run per hour and per day.

• Lifetime: 3 audits an hour, 10 in 24 hours, latest 25 saved.
• Agency: 10 audits an hour, 30 in 24 hours, latest 100 saved.
• Both: 2 audits running at once, 10 pages read per audit, 3 competitors per audit, and 5 live checks an hour.

When you pass the saved limit, your oldest audit is removed. Download anything you want to keep.

No. A failed audit does not count against your hourly limit, your daily limit or your refund eligibility. If an AI provider stalls or refuses, we automatically try a backup model first.

Try again in a minute or two. If it keeps failing, check that your key has credit, then email support.

Your site may block automated visitors, need a login, or show an error page to bots. We try a direct read first, then a reader service for pages built with JavaScript. If both fail, no AI credit is used.

If it is your own site, ask your host or security service to allow us. Sites behind a login cannot be audited.

Press Re-audit on the report. The new report shows the change against your last audit of the same website, and your score history builds up over time.

For the live check, press "Use the last questions again". Asking the same questions is the fair way to compare.

Yes. Open the report and press the bin icon at the top right, next to Re-audit. A deleted audit cannot be brought back, so download anything you want to keep first.

It is a score from 0 to 100 for how easy your public pages are for AI assistants to read, understand and cite. Fixed rules calculate it from what we count on your site, so the same site gets the same score whichever AI model you choose.

It does not measure how often AI recommends you. The live check does that.

No. They are our estimates. We re-weight the same four categories using our own view of what each assistant tends to favour. Those companies do not publish these weights, and these are not rankings from inside their products. The methodology page shows the exact weights.

Higher is better. The grade is your score as a letter, like a school mark:

• A+ is 90 or more, A is 85 or more, A- is 80 or more
• B+ is 75 or more, B is 70 or more, B- is 65 or more
• C+ is 60 or more, C is 55 or more, C- is 50 or more
• D+ is 45 or more, D is 40 or more, D- is 35 or more
• F is below 35

Not necessarily. Google rankings use links and many signals we do not measure. This score looks at whether your pages give AI clear, citable content. A strong brand can also be named often while scoring low here, so read the score together with the live check.

We set them ourselves for each type of business. They are not measured from other companies, and a site does not need to hit them to be cited. Use them as a direction, not a rule. A small agency does not need 50 blog posts to start seeing progress.

A 0 means we did not find it in the 10 pages and sitemap we checked. Your content may sit on a page we did not read, or use an address we did not recognise. A clear address such as /blog/ or /case-studies/ helps both us and AI crawlers.

A crawler is a program that AI companies send to read websites. Your site has a small file called robots.txt that tells crawlers whether they may come in.

We read that file and show you whether 13 AI crawlers are allowed. Seven are used for AI search and answers. If those are blocked, fix that first, because AI search cannot read your site. Six are used to train AI models. Allowing those is your choice, and it does not affect AI search.

A separate checklist from 0 to 100, on top of your main score. It looks at signs of expertise, whether other sites know you, whether your pages answer questions in their first lines, your schema, how fresh your pages are, crawler access, headings, and whether your name is used consistently. It does not change your main score.

For other websites, we only check sources we can verify: Wikidata, Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Review sites block automated checks, so look at those yourself.

Work from the top. Each action shows what you have now, our target, the steps, the time it may take, and which estimate it can lift. Quick wins are marked. You do not need to finish all of them.

You get up to 20 questions to answer on your site, in four groups: authoritative, thought leadership, competitive advantage and emerging opportunity. Press "Write more ideas" for more, up to 40 in each group. Each press costs under 1 cent and avoids ideas you already have.

An idea that cites a number we could not find on your own site is dropped.

A PDF report, a CSV of the data, and the AEO Pack ZIP. All are yours to keep. Note that downloading any of them ends your refund eligibility.

It asks real questions to live AI engines with web search on, then shows whether you were named, what each engine said, and who it named instead. It only runs when you press the button, and you see the cost first.

Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, GPT and Grok. Pick one, several or all. Estimated cost for 8 questions:

• Perplexity: about 5 cents
• Gemini: about 6 cents
• Claude: about 20 cents
• GPT: about 27 cents
• Grok: about 35 cents

You can also add one more model of your own in Settings, as long as it has web search.

Not exactly. We ask each company's AI through its official connection for software, called an API, with web search turned on. Their own apps can answer differently, and the ChatGPT app also uses a person's past chats.

So think of this as a clean test you can repeat, not a copy of what one person sees on their phone.

By default, AI writes 8 questions for your business: 3 that name you and 5 that do not. Open any question in the report to read every engine's answer.

Press "Ask my own questions" to write your own, up to 25, one per line. "Write me new questions" gives you fresh ones to edit. "Use the last questions again" repeats your last set.

A question like "Is Acme any good?" already contains your name, so AI nearly always talks about you. That proves little about being recommended. A question like "Who is the best payroll tool for small teams?" is where AI decides who to suggest.

So we count them apart. Lead with the number for questions that did not name you. Read the by-name answers to check that what AI says about you is correct.

It is common, especially for smaller brands. It does not mean something is broken. It means AI does not yet think of you when people ask for your kind of business.

• Start with the Playbook.
• Publish clear answers to the questions in your check.
• Get mentioned on other websites people trust.
• After a while, press "Use the last questions again" and compare.

AI answers change from run to run, and sources change every day. Treat each check as a dated snapshot, and look for a pattern across several questions and runs, not one answer.

After you make real changes, and after giving them time to be picked up. There is no fixed time, as each AI company works differently. Daily checks tell you little, because answers move every day even when your site does not. The limit is 5 checks an hour.

Your key ran out of credit, or hit its spending limit, partway through. The answers you already paid for are kept, so nothing is lost.

Add credit or raise the limit on your key at OpenRouter, wait about a minute, then run the check again.

That AI company did not reply in time at that moment. The other engines' answers are still there, and you are only charged for answers you received.

Run the check again later. To save money, you can select just that engine.

Yes. A summary of each check stays in your history, with the date, the engines and the result. The full answers shown in the report are from your latest check.

Ten files built from your own pages: llms.txt, llms-full.txt, robots-patch.txt, five schema files (Organization, WebSite, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList), a plain-text copy of your homepage, and INSTRUCTIONS.md with install steps.

Nothing is invented. Anything we could not verify is marked [REPLACE] for you to fill in.

• High priority: robots-patch.txt, llms.txt and schema/Organization.jsonld.
• Medium: schema/WebSite.jsonld, schema/FAQPage.jsonld and schema/Article.jsonld.
• Low: schema/BreadcrumbList.jsonld, llms-full.txt and the homepage copy.

If AI search crawlers are blocked, fix robots.txt before anything else.

Your developer can do this in minutes. If you are doing it yourself:

• robots-patch.txt: add its lines to your existing robots.txt file. Do not replace the whole file.
• llms.txt: upload it to the top level of your site, so that yourdomain.com/llms.txt opens in a browser. If you already have one, combine them.
• Schema files: paste each one between script tags of type application/ld+json, in the head section of the page. INSTRUCTIONS.md says which page.
• FAQPage schema: only use it on a page that really shows those questions and answers.

Usually yes. On WordPress, upload through your host's file manager or a plugin, and add schema with a header plugin. Webflow, Framer, Squarespace and Wix offer custom code areas for schema, but file uploads to the top of your domain vary, so use their custom-file or redirect options.

Hosted platforms can restrict robots.txt and file access. Your platform's help pages have the current steps. If you cannot do it yourself, give INSTRUCTIONS.md to your developer.

Nobody can promise that, and major AI companies have not all said they use it. It is cheap to publish and gives any tool that reads it a clean summary of your key pages. That is why it is in the pack, but your content and your reputation on other sites matter more.

No tool can guarantee that. We fix what can be measured and show you what AI says today. Being cited also depends on your reputation elsewhere, your competitors, and how each AI company works.

Your name, logo, accent colour, report title and contact line on every PDF, in place of Citation Rocket's branding. You also get higher limits: 30 audits in 24 hours, 10 an hour, and 100 saved. Everything else is the same. See the agency page.

Open Settings, then Agency branding. Add your agency name, report title, accent colour and footer line. The logo must be PNG or JPEG, up to 200 KB. Save, then download any PDF. You have one branding profile per account.

Yes. Agency licensees may deliver reports and files to their own clients, and you set your own prices. What you cannot do is share, sell or resell your account or licence. Clients get your deliverables, not a login.

No. There are no client logins, team seats, custom domains or scheduled reports. You run the audits and send the PDF or files. White-labelling applies to the PDF, not to the app.

You do, on your OpenRouter key. You may want to build that into your price. A five-engine check costs about 80 cents at today's prices. Keep a spending limit on the key.

Yes. You pay Citation Rocket once. Your only other cost is your own AI usage at OpenRouter's prices, which you control. "Lifetime" means the lifetime of the product, not the buyer, as the Terms say.

If you bought on citationrocket.com, press the refund button in Settings. You qualify within 14 days of purchase if you have run fewer than 3 audits and have not downloaded a PDF, CSV or AEO Pack. A failed audit does not count. Your licence ends immediately and the money goes back to your original payment method.

Marketplace purchases follow that marketplace's refund policy.

Yes. Email support@citationrocket.com from the email on your account and ask to upgrade. You pay the difference between the two prices on the day you ask, and we switch your account over.

Dodo Payments is the merchant of record. It handles checkout, tax and invoices, and we never see your card details. Your purchase email has your invoice.

Everything you downloaded stays yours and keeps working: PDFs, CSVs and the AEO Pack. The scoring method is public on the methodology page. Your OpenRouter account is your own, so any remaining credit stays there.

A licence is for one account. If you delete your account, your licence is released and can be activated on a new one. If you need help with this, email support first, because deleting an account also deletes your audits and saved key.

Open Settings and press Delete my account. Your audits, saved key and account record are deleted straight away and cannot be brought back. Payment records stay with Dodo Payments, as the law requires.

The websites you audit, the business details you confirm, the report, your check results and history, and short excerpts of public pages used for the AEO Pack. We do not store whole pages. We do not sell your data. Read the Privacy Policy for the full list.

Yes. Partners earn 35 percent of each sale they refer. It is paid once per sale, after a 14-day hold. You get your own link and a portal to track your sales. See the partner page.

OpenRouter did not accept your key. It may be mistyped, or it may have been deleted or switched off.

Create a new key at OpenRouter, then open Settings here, paste it under OpenRouter key and save.

Your OpenRouter account has run out of money, or this key has reached the limit you set for it.

Add credit at openrouter.ai, or raise the limit on that key. Changes can take about a minute to apply, then try again.

The free AI credit from your invite link has been spent. Your licence is still yours, and your saved reports stay.

To keep auditing, create your own OpenRouter key and add it in Settings.

You can run two audits at the same moment, and two are already running.

Wait for one to finish, usually a minute or two, then start the next.

You have reached your audits per hour or per 24 hours. Lifetime allows 3 an hour and 10 in 24 hours. Agency allows 10 an hour and 30 in 24 hours.

Nothing is wrong with your account. Wait a while and try again. Failed audits do not count.

These limits keep the service running well for everyone: 5 live checks and 10 website analyses in an hour.

Nothing is wrong with your account. Please try again a little later.

The code you typed does not work. Check for typing mistakes, and copy and paste it if you can. Each code works once.

If you bought it from a marketplace and it still fails, email support@citationrocket.com with your order details and we will sort it out.

The AI model you picked in Settings cannot search the web, and a live check needs that.

Open Settings, then AI models, and choose a Perplexity Sonar model. Or add :online to the end of the model name. If you are not sure, press Reset to recommended.