What the May 2026 audit started with: who the brand is, and what AI thinks it is
In May 2026, BeCited was a founder-led GEO audit service: flat-rate $200 for an audit, $150/month for tracking, in a category contested by SaaS dashboards and SEO agencies adding GEO services. Whether AI engines know us, and recommend us, is the thing this audit measures.
What the May 2026 audit produced: one score, four engines, the gap that matters
Engine-by-engine
Across 132 captures on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, BeCited appears in 15 responses and is the primary recommendation in 10. That puts us 3rd in a market AI engines surface 103 distinct brands for — but the rank flatters the reality. The two competitors ranked above us get cited 6–9× per audit-related query. We get cited once, sometimes twice.
The sharpest signal is the dimension breakdown: Source Presence at 5%. That’s the rubric saying “you are not on the platforms AI uses to answer this question.” Engine Consistency at 52% is the only above-floor number, and that’s because when any engine does find us, they roughly agree on what we are — the website signal is doing its job. The website isn’t the problem. The third-party ecosystem is.
Claude at 0% recommendation is the limit case: Claude leans on the widest, most editorial source set of the four engines, and it has nothing to cite. Until G2, Capterra, and a PCMag-tier placement exist, Claude has no path to recommending BeCited and the playbook below is what closes that.
What the May 2026 audit produced: the ranked priority moves, in their actual order
The audit returned 8 ranked priority moves. Seven carry high-impact labels. We publish the top five below, in the order the rubric returned them. Not curated. Not reordered.
The page above is the highlight reel. The May 2026 audit went deeper.
This sample shows the four blocks every audit produced in May 2026: brand, diagnosis, playbook, and a closing view. The full file contained the same blocks plus a working layer underneath — the libraries, maps, tickets, and timelines a team can pick up and run with.
- Flip target library. Side-by-side comparisons of the prompts where AI named you in passing but recommended someone else — with the exact winning competitor quote and a strategy to take that prompt back.
- Source ecosystem map. Every domain AI cited when answering questions about your category, tiered into primary / secondary / tertiary sources, with the unclaimed high-leverage platforms named.
- Site readiness audit. 19-check technical scan of how AI crawlers see your site — robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, quotability, information gain, render completeness, Core Web Vitals, plus per-page scoring on additional URLs you nominate.
- Per-engine job tickets. Each priority move expanded into a checklist with target URLs, exact copy you can paste into your CMS, success metrics, and the engine the move is meant to lift — ready to assign.
- Competitor interception plans. A per-competitor strategy for each of the top 5 threats — their positioning, their head-to-head record against you, and the specific signal you’d need to add to win their share.
- 90-day timeline + re-audit. Moves bucketed by when they realistically fit (this week / 30 / 60 / 90 days). Monthly tracking clients got a re-audit with action attribution, score delta, and trend velocity.
Today’s Full Audit is different. It shows where you show up, question by question and tool by tool; who AI picks instead of you; the pages to get onto; anything blocking AI from your site; and your 90-day plan, with every answer included. It gives no 0–100 score or grade.
Yes, we published our own F-grade. The rubric works because it grades us honestly too.
The standard pattern in GEO — and in SEO before it — is to publish only the audits that flatter the methodology. We could have done that. We have a real client who scored 57 we could have led with.
BeCited’s rubric scored BeCited a 17 out of 100. We’re publishing it as the sample. If we don’t, the rubric doesn’t mean what we say it means — and a rubric that flatters its author isn’t 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. We’re running it on ourselves in public, with a re-audit date already on the calendar.
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 competitors. 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 “five of these six claims aren’t reaching the answer layer, here is which one to fix first.”