Cited
AI answer-visibility audits for local businesses · a Sawpoint project
This work is produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a person before it reaches you.
AI assistants don't recommend businesses from memory. They read the open web at the moment of the question and repeat what it says. So the thing that decides whether you get named isn't how good your website looks — it's what the sources an assistant reads actually say about you.
best personal injury lawyer Huntington Station NY
Six results, six directories, zero law firm websites. The same query on 29 August returned five, and read exactly the same way — every result a directory, not one law firm’s own site. An assistant answering that question is reading those six pages. If your listing on them is thin, out of date, or missing, you are not in the answer — no matter how much you spent on your site.
What gets checked
Every finding is something I can show you on a live page, with the URL, on the date I ran it. Nothing is estimated and nothing is scored by a black box.
The five to ten questions a real customer would ask, run live. Who gets named, which pages the answer would be built from, and where you appear — if you appear.
Which of the sources that dominate your category actually list you, and which of those listings are stale, thin, or wrong.
Your robots.txt read line by line for the AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest. Plenty of sites block them by accident, usually via a plugin default.
Whether your pages carry machine-readable facts about the business at all, and whether the type is right for what you actually do.
The same three facts as they appear across your site and every listing found. Conflicting versions are the most common reason a business gets skipped.
Hours, service area, pricing posture, credentials, what you do and don't take. If a fact isn't on the page in plain text, it can't be repeated back.
Counties are not towns. Assistants answer town-level questions, and most sites never name the towns they serve.
Across the question set, who gets named most, and what those businesses have on the record that you don't.
A ranked list, cheapest and highest-impact first, each item written so you or your web person can act on it without a follow-up call.
I don't have a private line into any AI company, and neither does anyone selling you a score. Nobody can promise you a ranking inside a model's answer, and a vendor who does is guessing at best.
What I audit is the evidence layer underneath the answers — the search results, listings, structured data and crawler access that assistants read when they answer. That layer is public, checkable, and the part you can actually change. If your audit turns up nothing worth fixing, I'll tell you that and refund it.
Sample findings
A medical spa in Huntington, New York, chosen at random from a live search on 29 August 2026. The business is unnamed here on purpose; a client's own report names everything.
No structured data anywhere on the site
Not one machine-readable fact about the business. Hours, address and services exist only as text a human has to interpret.
AI crawlers are not blocked
robots.txt carries no rule against GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. Worth confirming again later — a plugin update can reverse this silently.
Service area given only as counties
"Nassau County," "Suffolk County," "Long Island" — no town names. Town-level questions are the ones customers ask.
Address, phone and hours in plain page text
All three present and readable, which is more than most sites in the category manage.
Outranked on its own core question
On the main service-plus-town query, aggregator pages and two multi-location chains sit above the practice's own site.
Before the prices
Worth saying before you see my numbers rather than after. The largest freelance marketplace now runs a whole category for this work — Generative Engine Optimization — carrying more than 3,200 listings and starting at $5. If you go shopping, that is what you will find first, and $79 will look expensive beside it.
So here is what the cheap end is actually selling. Of the ten lowest-priced listings I read on 7 September 2026, six promise a ranking — "rank 1st on Google and ChatGPT" is a real title, quoted as written — and four are backlink packages with the AI-search label on the front. The first is a promise nobody can keep, including me. The second is an older service in a newer wrapper.
The expensive end has a free option too, and it is honest about what it is: the vendor selling a $249 report gives away a preliminary scan of three questions across two assistants. Three questions is a sample. It can tell you whether to worry. It can't tell you what to do.
| The $5–$20 listing | The free scan | Cited, $79 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What's sold | A ranking, or backlinks relabelled | A taster for a $249 report | Nine checks, run on your business |
| Questions run | Not stated in the listing | Three, across two assistants | Five to ten — the ones your customers ask |
| Evidence you can open | Not advertised | The scan's own output | A URL and a date beside every finding |
| What it promises | A position in an answer | Nothing — and says so | Findings you can check, and a refund if there's nothing worth fixing |
One caveat I'd rather state than have you find: I read those listings, I didn't buy them. That table is what they advertise, not what they deliver — some of them may do fine work. What I can say is that a promise about a ranking has no URL behind it, and every line of a Cited report does.
Pricing
At the other end of the market: one vendor publishing its own numbers quotes audits from $500 to $5,000+, and the cheapest named one-time report found sells at $249 with monthly tracking at $99. Both pages were re-checked on 8 September 2026 and both figures are unchanged from the 29 August reading — the sources are listed below, and you can open them yourself.
Report
$79
Report + Fix Pack
$199
Watch
$29 / month
How to start
Free before anything else: send your website and I'll run the first two checks and reply with what I find, whether or not you buy anything. If there's nothing wrong, that's a useful answer too.