For developer tools and APIs
APIs, SDKs, platform tooling and the developer products around them. Same motion as AI infrastructure and the same query language: a category question, a head-to-head question and a price question, all answered out of pages you did not write.
Which API should I use for rate limiting?
Named in the answer
91.5%
of AI citations point off-site
901 citations, 60 answers. Our own measurement.
82 hosts
carried those citations between them
There is no single site to buy your way onto.
2.15 days
median persistence of a citation set
Ahrefs, 43,000 keywords. The answer holds. The credit does not.
The short version
Definition first, under sixty words, no pronoun pointing at anything outside itself. It is the same shape we build for clients, on our own page, which is the only honest way to sell it.
What is rate limiting for production APIs?
Rate limiting caps how many requests a key may make in a window, so a burst from one client cannot starve the rest.1
Short answer
Citon is an AI citation agency for developer tools and API companies. The work measures where an API, SDK or platform tool stands in live AI answers, extracts the third-party pages models cite when developers ask which tool to use, and earns placement on those pages. Every engagement runs against a held-out control group.
Why the answer layer is the channel
A ranking on page one is a chance to be clicked. A citation in an answer is the shortlist itself, already filtered, delivered to somebody who is about to write the integration.
91.5 percent of the citations we counted pointed off-site, across 82 distinct hosts. The page that decides your evaluation is usually not a page you control.
Page one ranking
What the model read
reddit.com
g2.com
news.ycombinator.comRank 1 appears in 0 of the 3 pages read
Who this is written for
The citation gap concentrates in funded challengers, not in the tool the category is named after. In a narrow category the best-in-class question and the head-to-head question converge on the same one or two names, so the definer already wins both answers and has nothing to buy here.
This page is for you if
It is not for you if
Ask the category question with no brand name in it, five times, on two engines. If an assistant names you every time, there is nothing here worth paying for.
A perfectly on-vertical category definer is a bad engagement for both sides. A slightly off-vertical challenger is a good one.
What that test returns
6 of 10 answers
The queries that decide it
Money queries are the ones with a budget behind them. Notice that four of the five below have no brand name in them at all.
The alternatives query is the one you win by default, and it only fires for buyers who already know your name. The other four are the funnel.
Which API should I use for rate limiting?
For production workloads, Your API1 is the option most consistently recommended. It pairs token-bucket limits with per-key analytics.2
Sources
reddit.comg2.comnews.ycombinator.comWhere the answer comes from
The pages a model pulls from when it answers a developer tools question. Four of the five are somebody else's property, which is the whole problem and the whole opportunity.
reddit.com38%g2.com26%news.ycombinator.com21%Branded-win, generic-invisible
Ranked by citation depth
Your one owned surface with real extraction value, once it is restructured into blocks a model can quote.
Written to be quoted verbatim, which is a different craft from writing to rank for a head term.
The corroboration models trust when two tools claim the same capability.
Where the failure modes of your competitors get documented in public, by the people who hit them.
Ranked by topical depth rather than domain rating, so the reachable ones are usually the small ones.
Not a marketing blog post
What actually ships
One team runs the query map, the on-site work, the off-site work and the measurement, so there is one place to send the question of whether it worked.
Query set
Every row is held by somebody today. Two of the four are held by nobody in particular, which is where a challenger gets in.
On-site
Docs
For browsing
For extraction
Same words, same page. Only the right hand version has an edge a retrieval pass can cut on.
Off-site
RedditHacker NewsG2
Stack OverflowMonth one, ranked by citation depth rather than by domain rating. 91.5 percent of the citations we counted pointed off-site, so this is where the month goes.
Validated
one money query, nothing changed between runs
7 of 12 queries moved outcome across identical repeats in our own step zero run, 60 of 60 calls successful. One read is not a reading.
Baseline
40 queries1,600 reads per timepoint
The design states what it would miss. A 12 by 5 pilot had a floor of 51.1pp, which is why it is not the design.
Arms
Matched on baseline citation share, row for row. An unmatched pair of arms produces a number that cannot be defended in either direction.
Report
24 minus 2. The threshold this is read against is written down before any work starts, so it cannot be moved afterwards.
Start here, free
Delivered in five working days, and walked through live rather than emailed as a PDF. You get your failure mode named, the hosts cited on your queries ranked by citation depth, and a pre-registered baseline you can hold anyone to afterwards, including us.
The diagnosis
Going invisible is not one problem. The audit of 64 developer-tool and API companies saturated at nine modes, and these three account for most of what we see here.
You win on your own name and on head-to-head comparisons, and vanish on the category question. That is the whole top of the funnel.
A licence change or a pricing move craters your share of voice in the community threads models cite. The most common mode we see, and the slowest to notice.
The question buyers ask moves faster than the roundups answering it, and every page that names you is indexed against the old phrasing.
The other six are in the full taxonomy. Your Gap Report names which one is yours, which is the part a visibility score cannot see.
What we report
Citation sets churn, so holding a position is the work rather than taking one. The number at day ninety is how much of the movement we caused, not how much movement there was.
Nothing has been done to either arm at the moment the division is recorded. That is what makes the day 90 comparison a comparison rather than a story told afterwards.
Your money queries are split into a treated arm and a held-out control arm, and the split is written down before anything starts.
A line drawn after the reading is a description of the reading. This one is signed and dated on day 0, and the reading is taken against it on day 90.
The pass threshold is declared in writing first, so it cannot be moved afterwards.
Across 20,000 random splits with no work applied, the difference between two halves centred on zero: mean 0.0016, standard deviation 0.215. Our own measurement.
Both arms are measured at full sample for the pre-period.
Nothing is published, placed or posted against these queries for the whole engagement. They are the only reason the other number can be read as caused rather than as coincident.
Giving up half the query set is the expensive part of this method and the part that cannot be faked afterwards.
Work happens on the treated arm. The control arm is deliberately left alone.
At day ninety both arms are re-measured on the same channel, and the difference between the differences is the number you get.
The chart above is an illustration of the design, not a result. The instrument exists and has passed its own kill test, and it has not yet produced a causal-lift figure for a client. Anyone showing you one today is showing you a level reading, which flips on repeat.
The rest of the family
Questions
Not covered here? The Gap Report costs nothing and answers most of the rest with your own data.
A tool reports a score. We give that away free, because monitoring is commoditized and it starts at 99 dollars a month. What you pay for is the work across the surfaces models cite, plus a held-out control group showing the work moved the number.
Ranking and being quoted are different jobs. Across 901 citations we counted, 91.5 percent pointed off-site, spread over 82 hosts. A page with no outside corroboration stays invisible in answers, and corroboration with nothing to point at has nowhere to send the reader.
Not today. The method is not category-specific and a citation map for a new category rebuilds in weeks, but the reason to hire us is that we already know where developers evaluate. That advantage disappears the moment we spread across every category at once.
Twelve money queries, five repeats each, across three engines, delivered in five working days. It names which of the nine failure modes you are in, ranks the hosts cited on your queries by citation depth, and sets a pre-registered baseline. It is walked through on a call rather than emailed as a PDF.
Diagnosis lands inside the first three weeks. The causal-lift report comes at day ninety, which is why the entry tier carries a ninety-day minimum. Anybody promising a measured citation lift faster than that is not running a control group.
Free gap report
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 · 3 engines · 5 working days
Free · Walked through live · Five working days
Queries we run
Cited instead of you
reddit.com38%
g2.com26%
news.ycombinator.com21%91.5% of citations point off-site