The blocked crawler
A blanket anti-scraping rule from years ago can silently block the exact crawlers that surface sites in AI answers. Your site is invisible, and nothing in your analytics says so.
robots.txt → Disallow: /AI visibility diagnostics for businesses
When a buyer asks AI Overviews, is your name in the answer?
The major AI engines now decide which brands get named when someone asks for a recommendation. The Citation Lab shows you, with evidence rather than promises, whether each one can reach you, understand you, quote you, and recommend you.
The problem
Most audits never check any of this.
01
02
The unquotable page
Engines quote pages with clear structure and real evidence. Structure alone lifted citation rates 17.3% in research across six engines. A wall of marketing copy gives them nothing to lift into an answer.
0 citable claims found
03
The invisible brand
When buyers ask the questions that matter in your category, a competitor may be named three times more often than you. Nobody reports this, so nobody notices.
competitor named 3× more
Research results under specific conditions, never guarantees.
See the evidence base →
The diagnosis
Six layers. One answer.
L1Access
Can AI crawlers reach your site at all?
L2Understandability
Can engines tell who you are and what you do?
L3Trust
Is there real evidence you’re credible: bios, credentials, case studies?
L4Citation-worthiness
Is your content structured and evidenced so engines can quote it?
L5Conversion
When visitors do arrive, does the site convert them?
L6AI Visibility
Do engines actually name you when buyers ask, and how often versus competitors?
↑ We diagnose bottom-up. Access problems make everything above them theoretical.
How it works
Start free. Fix what's found. Then measure.
01Free
Readiness check
We run it before we ever talk. You get one concrete, verifiable finding. No charge, no pitch deck.
02Fixed fee
Diagnostic report
The full six-layer audit: a prioritized fix list plus a baseline of your visibility against named competitors.
03Project
Fix work
Bounded, scoped remediation: crawler access, structured data, trust architecture, content restructuring. Clear before-and-after.
04Retainer
Monitoring
Engines change, so we re-measure on an honest cadence and report what moved, without claiming causation.
Our position
No promises.
Evidence.
What we will never claim
That we can guarantee an AI engine will cite or recommend you. Nobody can, because engines are proprietary, non-deterministic, and change over time.
That AI visibility replaces SEO. It doesn't. It raises the cost of weak fundamentals.
That you need monthly reports. A quiet category gets a quarterly cadence, not an invoice.
What we will show you
The exact line in your robots.txt blocking the crawler that feeds AI answers.
The pages no engine could quote, and what structural change makes them citable.
How often you and your competitors are named in the questions your buyers actually ask, measured across engines and tracked over time.
Frequently asked
What this is, and what it isn't
01
What does The Citation Lab actually sell?
Four things, in this order: a free readiness check, a fixed-fee diagnostic report, scoped fix work, and optional monitoring. All of it is consulting work delivered by people. What each one includes, and what each one costs, is published in full on the pricing page.
02
Does The Citation Lab publish an AI visibility index or ranking?
No. There is no Citation Lab index, leaderboard, score or named framework to look your business up in. The per-engine numbers on this page are cited from AuditSpark's public index, a third-party source we link to so you can check every figure yourself.
03
Is this a software product or a subscription tool?
Neither. There is no dashboard to log into and no seat to buy. We run the diagnosis, hand over the findings, and you act on them with us or with anyone else. Monitoring is a recurring service on an honest cadence, not a platform.
04
How is this different from SEO?
AI visibility doesn't replace SEO. It raises the cost of weak fundamentals. Search ranking decides which links a person is shown; AI visibility decides whether an engine names you at all in an answer nobody clicks past. The same weak foundations hurt both, and they fail differently.
05
Who runs The Citation Lab?
Brian Hodgdon, who founded the practice and does the diagnostic work. The About page carries the background, a photo, and a LinkedIn profile. Book a fifteen-minute review and that is who you will be talking to.
Know where you stand.
The readiness check is free. We'll run it, find one concrete thing, and show it to you before you pay for anything. It takes four to five minutes and you don't have to sit through it.
Measured across the major AI engines
Google AI Overviews
Perplexity
Copilot
Claude
OpenAI
Gemini
Google AI Overviews
Perplexity
Copilot
Claude
OpenAI
Gemini