New: the nine ways developer tools go invisible in AI answers.
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Answers

Direct answers on getting cited by AI assistants

Short answer

What is the Citon answer feed?

The Citon answer feed is a set of short, self-contained answers to what technical founders ask before they buy any of this: why an assistant names a competitor, what actually decides a recommendation, why documentation is not enough on its own, and how long it takes before a change can be proved rather than hoped for. Every number in it is our own measurement or a third-party result credited to whoever produced it.

Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor instead of me?

Assistants answer from pages they retrieve, not from what your site says. If the pages they read do not name you, you are not in the answer.

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How do I get my API recommended by AI assistants?

Get onto the third-party pages assistants retrieve, make what they say about you accurate, and measure it with enough repeats to be real.

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Why is my documentation not cited by AI assistants?

Docs answer how to use a product for someone who already chose it. Recommendation questions get answered from pages that compare, and docs never compare.

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Does my MCP server need answer engine optimization?

For an MCP server, being named in an answer and being installed are the same event. The recommendation is the distribution channel.

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How long does answer engine optimization take to work?

Citations rotate in days, so movement shows up fast. Proving the movement was yours needs a held-out control group and roughly 90 days of measurement.

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Do I need an AEO agency, or is an AI visibility tool enough?

A visibility tool reports a score. It cannot tell you whether that score moving was your work or the model changing its mind, and it does not do the work either.

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Does publishing more content get you cited by AI assistants?

Across 901 citations we measured, 91.5 percent point at pages nobody in the answer owns. Publishing volume on your own site is the smallest lever in that split.

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Should I do AEO in-house, or hire an agency?

The work splits into on-site pages, off-site placement, and a held-out control measurement. Most in-house attempts staff for the first and skip the third.

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How do you prove AEO work caused the AI citation lift, not just coincidence?

A held-out control arm and enough queries to clear the noise floor. Our own permutation test over 20,000 splits found the unworked null centers on zero.

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Is AEO only for developer tools and APIs, or does it work for any company?

The method is not niche-specific. We stay inside developer tools, APIs, CLIs and MCP servers, because the citation map for a new category rebuilds from zero.

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Every answer

The full answer index.

Every question in the feed, in one place. The cards above show the lane; this is the list a crawler follows, so nothing here is reachable only from a sitemap.

1 categories

10 posts

Free gap report

When the model answers,
be the one it names

Tell us your category and the questions your buyers ask. We run them against live AI answers and walk you through what came back. If you are already winning, we will tell you that too.

12 queries · 5 repeats each · 5 working days

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Free · Walked through live · Five working days

Gap ReportSample
12 queries · 5 repeats each

Queries we run

best rate limiting api
your-api alternativesYou, 1 of 12
cheapest webhook api
api gateway for startups

Cited instead of you

reddit.com38%
g2.com26%
news.ycombinator.com21%

91.5% of citations point off-site

Your failure mode, named
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