We Built an AEO Monitoring Tool. Then We Turned It on Our Own Product.

Rentail, our property management SaaS, had zero AI citations when we started measuring. Now it has 17 out of 217 tracked queries, a visibility score of 67, and 100% query coverage.

The irony is that we built cite.me.in specifically because we couldn’t find a tool to measure this. We built the speedometer, turned it on, and found nothing.

This isn’t an academic problem. AI-referred sessions grew 527% year-over-year in early 2025, and AI visitors convert at 4.4x the rate of organic search traffic. If you’re not being cited, you’re not in the funnel.

The most important thing we learned: the biggest lever wasn’t on our own site.

AI engines don’t just read your homepage. They build a picture of you from everything they’ve read — every newsletter mention, every Reddit thread, every directory listing, every comparison page. Your own content sets the foundation. Other people’s content is what tips you from unknown to cited.

We didn’t fully believe this until we watched it happen.

“In search, you competed for a position. In AI, you compete for a sentence — and that sentence is written by everyone who’s ever mentioned you, not just by you.”

— Assaf Arkin, Co-Founder, cite.me.in

What we actually did

When cite.me.in showed us zero citations for Rentail, we worked through the obvious list:

• Checked robots.txt — Made sure AI crawlers weren’t being blocked. They weren’t, mostly. Worth checking yours.
• Added FAQ schema to the homepage — Targeting the exact questions people ask AI about property management software.
• Fixed a price mismatch in our schema — We had $29 in our SoftwareApplication markup, not $35. Small thing, but schema should be accurate.
• Wrote a definitional page — “What is property management software?” — the kind of direct, factual page AI engines love to cite when someone asks a basic category question.
• Published comparison pages — Honest side-by-sides against our main competitors.

None of this is magic. It’s the same work you’d do for Google, except content format matters more, schema matters more, and third-party mentions matter a lot more.

What moved the needle — and what didn’t

Context that makes these results meaningful: each AI platform cites only 2–7 domains per response, compared to Google’s 10 blue links. It’s winner-take-most, not a gradient.

Moved citations:

• The definitional page. Within a few weeks, Rentail started appearing in answers to basic category questions. Fastest win.
• Third-party mentions. Every directory listing, newsletter mention, and forum thread nudged the citation rate up. This compounds slowly and then all at once.

Table stakes — hygiene, not growth:

• Schema fixes. Accurate schema matters, but correcting a price mismatch doesn’t generate new citations. It removes friction.
• Robots.txt check. Same: necessary, not a lever.

The comparison pages are still early. We expect them to compound as they get picked up by other sites.

Where we landed

17 citations out of 217 tracked queries. Visibility score of 67. Query coverage at 100% — our AEO monitoring is tracking every relevant query in our category, so there are no blind spots.

Zero to 17 isn’t a victory lap. It’s a measurable start. Which is the point.

Without cite.me.in, we’d have no idea if any of this was working. We’d be making changes into a black box and hoping something moved.

The funnel used to start with a click. Now it starts with a conversation the marketer never sees. If you want to run the same playbook, here are the seven tactics that move AI citation rates most — and why monitoring has to come first.

Find out where you stand — free for 25 days, no credit card required.