The methodology
Most agencies hide their scoring behind a sales call. We publish ours. Here is exactly what a CitedIQ score measures, how the tiers work, and how the Deticia Engine turns a low score into citations from the engines your customers ask.
A CitedIQ score is Verocited's measure of how visible a business is to AI engines and search. It reports three honest scores out of 100, each with a plain-language tier label. The score reflects what is actually present on your site and across the web. A strong site earns a strong score. There is no manufactured alarm, because a number you cannot trust is worthless to both of us. The scoring framework has its own reference site at CitedIQ.com.
Structure, clarity, content depth, technical health, and how cleanly a machine can read what you do.
Meta hygiene, keyword targeting, local signals, and the traditional ranking factors Google still uses.
Entity consistency, schema, direct-answer content, and presence in the directories AI engines read.
The four tiers
The tier tells you what the number means without needing a consultant to translate it.
AI engines cannot reliably find or describe you. Likely missing schema, inconsistent business details, and absent from the directories that feed the models.
Some signals are in place, but gaps keep you out of AI answers. Often a decent site with no structured data or directory presence.
A solid foundation that is close. Usually missing one or two layers, most often schema and citation distribution, that would tip you into being cited.
Well positioned to be cited by AI engines. Consistent entity, clean structure, answer-ready content, and corroboration across the directories models trust.
How we calculate it
We score what is observable. Where a signal cannot be confirmed from the outside, such as schema hidden behind a theme, we say so rather than guess.
We read your homepage and every key page: services, about, contact, resources. We note tech stack, meta hygiene, content depth, and structured data.
We research the three to four competitors AI engines actually surface in your category and capture their scale, schema, and citation strength.
We apply the CitedIQ framework to produce three numbers and tiers. Honest scoring: a strong site gets a strong score.
Every gap becomes a specific recommendation, sequenced by impact, so you know what moves the number and in what order.
If CitedIQ is the diagnosis, the DeticIA Engine is the treatment. It is the proprietary methodology we use to turn a low score into citations. The method is documented in full at DeticIA.com.
Read deticIA backward and it spells AICited. The same two capital letters, mirrored end to end. The name is the method in reverse: the engine that turns "not seen" into "cited by AI."
The DeticIA Engine repairs the four layers AI engines actually read, in the only order that works. You cannot distribute citations for a business that describes itself three different ways, and you cannot benefit from schema on content that does not answer the question. Order is the method.
One locked source of truth for your name, address, phone, and description. Every appearance online must match, because AI engines distrust businesses that contradict themselves.
Schema markup that states plainly what you are, what you offer, and where, in the machine-readable format engines parse: Organization, Service, FAQPage, and more.
Pages rewritten to answer the real question in the first sentence, the exact format ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Grok lift and quote.
Consistent presence across the directories that feed the models, prioritized by what moves the needle for your business type. Foursquare is a major source for local data that several engines lean on.
What to expect, honestly
AI visibility is earned over months, not switched on overnight. We would rather set the expectation correctly than oversell a fast result we cannot promise.
Schema, entity consistency, direct-answer content, and the directory and citation campaign are built and submitted, usually within about two weeks. This is the part we control, and we move fast. Early movement shows in traditional search first, where changes index fastest.
This wait is the engines, not us. Directory listings finish publishing, schema gets picked up, and the early signs of AI recognition begin as the engines re-crawl on their own schedule. The structure starts paying off, though the off-page authority that drives AI citation is still accumulating.
This is when the work tends to show up where it counts: AI engines naming the business, citations accumulating, share of AI voice climbing. It compounds from here. The businesses that started early hold the lead as the category catches up.
AI engines do not see your site the moment you change it. Models are trained on a snapshot of the web with a cutoff date, and even the engines that retrieve live information cache what they find and re-crawl on their own schedule. So a change you publish today may not appear in an AI answer for weeks, because the engine is often still working from an older snapshot of your business until it re-indexes. This is not a flaw in the work; it is how the technology operates. It is also exactly why starting early matters: the sooner your signals are in place, the sooner they are captured in the snapshots that feed every future answer.
What we will never do: promise a citation by a fixed date. No honest firm can. What we can promise is the work that makes citation likely, and a clear, measured view of the progress the whole way through.
We practice this on ourselves
The definitions on this page are marked up as schema DefinedTerms, written in direct-answer format, and repeated consistently across the site. When an AI engine is asked "what is a CitedIQ score," this is the page we want it to read and quote. We do to verocited.com exactly what we do for clients.
Score your own site
{
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "CitedIQ score",
"description": "Verocited's measure of
how visible a business is to AI
engines and search. Three scores
out of 100 with tier labels from
Invisible to Authority."
}
The actual schema block on this page. View source and you will find it.
One URL, one honest read. See where you land across all three dimensions and what it would take to reach Authority.