Who BeCited is — and what AI thinks we are
BeCited is a founder-led GEO audit service — flat-rate $2,000 for a one-week audit, $1,500/quarter for tracking. The category is contested by SaaS dashboards (Peec AI, AthenaHQ, Profound) on the tech side and SEO agencies adding GEO services on the consulting side. Our wedge is supposed to be price ($2k vs $10k+ engagements) and verification rigor (manual citation review, no fuzzy-matching). Whether AI engines know that — and recommend us for it — is the thing this audit measures.
The audit’s honest read on us
Engine-by-engine
What our own tool prescribed
A rubric is only worth trusting if it grades its author honestly
The standard pattern in GEO — and in SEO before it — is to publish only the audits that flatter the methodology. A SaaS dashboard that shows you “visibility” usually defines the term in whichever way makes its numbers look good, then publishes case studies of clients who scored well on that definition.
BeCited’s rubric scored BeCited a 17 out of 100. We are publishing it. If we don’t, the rubric doesn’t mean what we say it means — and a rubric that flatters its author is not measurement, it’s marketing.
The audit also returned what every honest audit returns when run on a brand-new SaaS: fix your third-party presence, surface your differentiators, earn editorial coverage. The same playbook a $30k agency would charge for. Different in our case only in that we’re running it on ourselves in public.
Three things this audit confirms about how the methodology behaves
- The rubric punishes brand newness. A six-month-old SaaS with no G2 listing, no PCMag review, and no Wikipedia entry will score in the teens regardless of website quality. Site readiness graded B; the GEO score still graded F. Site quality is necessary, not sufficient.
- The rubric separates “mentioned” from “recommended.” Visibility is 11%, recommendation 8% — a 4-point conversion gap. AI knows we exist; it has no language to endorse us over Peec AI or Profound. That gap is what positioning fixes, not visibility budget.
- Configured differentiators are testable. We declared six positioning claims at audit setup. The rubric measured whether AI surfaces each one. Five surfaced zero times. The diagnostic isn’t “your messaging is weak” — it’s “these specific six claims aren’t reaching the answer layer, here is which one to fix first.”