What does Citorial actually do?

Citorial is a small AI search visibility team based in Brazil. Brands hire us to own their AI-search channel end-to-end. We make sure their brand shows up when their customers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, or DeepSeek what to buy. We measure where they stand today, publish their official brand page on citorial.com/brands, ship the rewritten product descriptions and the content that drives the growth, and re-check monthly so the brand sees what is working. The customer stays focused on their product — we own this channel.

Is this just an audit?

No. The report is the first thing we do — it shows where the brand stands and the highest-leverage actions. But the engagement is us doing the actual work: building and hosting the official brand page, rewriting the brand's top-performing product pages to read the way AI tools quote brands, drafting blog content targeted at the questions where competitors are winning and the brand is not, and maintaining ongoing monthly tracking. The Starter tier is the only report-only entry point; Standard and Premium are full done-for-you engagements.

How is this different from traditional SEO?

Traditional SEO optimizes for Google rankings on the search results page. Citorial targets the responses generated by AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek — which now answer billions of product-research queries per month. The signal is different, the deliverables are different, the timing is different. Citorial does the work end-to-end so the customer doesn't have to assemble a playbook, hire a specialist, or coordinate vendors.

Which AI engines does Citorial cover?

ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, Google Gemini, Grok (xAI), and DeepSeek. These six cover the vast majority of consumer-facing AI search traffic. The initial report covers all six in parallel, the brand page and the content work target all six, and Citorial Pulse re-checks all six monthly.

How long does a Citorial program take?

Starter ships in 5 business days, Standard in 7, Premium in 10 — that is the time from briefing submission to all deliverables (PDF + your official brand page live + content rewrites + plan) in your inbox. After the initial program ships, the Pulse subscription re-checks all six AI tools monthly on a fixed cadence.

What is the official brand page?

It is the official page of the customer's brand on citorial.com/brands/{their-slug} — a page Citorial creates, polishes, and keeps current. When an AI tool needs information about the brand or the category, it finds this page with everything clear, organized, and up to date. Citorial does the writing, the publishing, and the upkeep as part of every program tier — the customer never touches the work behind it.

Will my brand visibility actually improve?

Brands that ship the full Standard or Premium program typically see measurable visibility growth in at least one AI tool within 30 days, and across all six within 90. Results compound over time as content gets re-discovered and as the brand becomes a recognized name in the category. Citorial Pulse tracks the growth so you see exactly what worked.

Citorial is built for e-commerce brands and DTC operators doing $100K to $20M+ annual revenue who want to claim AI search visibility before competitors do. Most useful for brands already doing Google SEO well and now extending into the AI search channel.

What is the refund policy?

Every Citorial program comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee from delivery. If the program does not surface at least three actionable insights you did not already know, request a full refund — no questions asked. Pulse subscriptions can be canceled at any time.

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and how is it different from SEO?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) optimizes for "answer engines" — products like Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot that return a synthesized answer instead of a list of links. Traditional SEO optimizes for ranking ten blue links; AEO (and its sibling GEO) optimize for being the brand quoted inside the answer itself. The tactics overlap — structured data, clear summaries, authoritative third-party citations — but the surface and the measurement differ. Citorial provides AEO and GEO as a managed service.

Who provides GEO / AI search visibility services?

Citorial (https://citorial.com) is a done-for-you provider of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI search visibility for e-commerce and DTC brands. Citorial measures how a brand appears across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek; publishes an authoritative brand page; ships the content and on-site fixes that improve citation; and tracks the growth monthly. Engagements start at US$ 297. Citorial serves brands globally and in Brazil (with full Portuguese-language support).

How do I get my brand to appear in ChatGPT and other AI tools?

AI tools mention brands they find consistently and authoritatively across the open web. The highest-leverage actions are: publish a canonical, machine-readable profile of your brand; maintain consistent factual signals (name, category, claims) across crawlable HTML; earn mentions in high-authority third-party sources the models retrieve from; and add Schema.org structured data so engines classify you correctly. Citorial does this end-to-end as a managed service and tracks the resulting visibility monthly.

What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)? A complete guide for 2026

If you sell products online, you have probably noticed two trends colliding. First, fewer of your customers are starting their research on Google — many of them now open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude first and ask plain-English buying questions. Second, the search engines themselves are inserting AI-generated answers above the link results, so even the traffic that does come from Google now passes through a layer of generative summarization before it reaches your site.

Generative Engine Optimization, usually shortened to GEO, is the discipline of making sure your brand shows up inside those generated answers — not just below them. This guide explains what GEO actually is, how it relates to traditional SEO, and the five highest-leverage actions any e-commerce brand can ship this quarter to earn visibility in the four AI search products that matter today.

How GEO differs from SEO

SEO and GEO share the same underlying goal — get your brand recommended to a customer at the moment they are looking for it — but they optimize for different surfaces. SEO ranks a URL on a search engine results page; the user sees a list of ten blue links and chooses one to click. GEO targets the language model that generates the actual answer the user reads. The model may surface zero, one, or several URLs as citations, but the primary output is prose, not a list of links.

That difference cascades into every tactical choice. SEO rewards keyword density, technical on-page health, and PageRank-style link graphs. GEO rewards structured data, third-party citations that the retrieval pipeline can ingest cleanly, factual consistency across the web, and content that answers a question rather than ranking for a keyword.

For a fuller breakdown of the vocabulary, see our AI search glossary — in particular the entries on GEO, AEO, and retrieval-augmented generation.

The four LLMs that matter (today)

As of mid-2026, the consumer AI search market is concentrated around four products:

ChatGPT (OpenAI) — the largest by raw user count and the one most likely to be the user's first stop. Its built-in search mode (ChatGPT Search) retrieves from a Bing-backed web index plus a smaller set of partner sources.
Perplexity — the most aggressive citer of original sources. Perplexity shows footnotes for nearly every claim, which makes it the best place to earn click-through traffic if your content is the source it cites.
Google Gemini — the model behind Google AI Overviews. Lower per-user engagement than ChatGPT, but vastly higher distribution because it shows up by default for billions of Google searches.
Claude (Anthropic) — the smallest of the four for consumer search but increasingly used by professional buyers (agencies, B2B procurement, developer tools) where the user does extensive comparison before buying.

Each of these has its own retrieval and ranking quirks. A serious GEO program probes all four — running the same buyer-intent prompt across each model gives you a four-way picture of where your brand is winning and where it is invisible.

Five highest-leverage actions for this quarter

1. Explicitly opt in to AI crawlers in your robots.txt

The cheapest, easiest GEO action: edit your robots.txt to explicitly allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, and CCBot. Many brands have these crawlers blocked by default, either deliberately (a defensive posture against AI training that made sense in 2023) or accidentally (a CDN preset). If you want the LLMs to know about your brand, give them permission to fetch your pages.

2. Ship Schema.org structured data on every commercially-important page

At a minimum: Organization markup on your homepage, Product + Offer markup on every product page, FAQPage on FAQ-style content, and BreadcrumbList on category pages. Structured data is the closest thing to a direct line into a language model — it lets the retrieval pipeline extract facts about your brand without having to guess at unstructured prose.

3. Write the comparison content that the LLMs will quote

Buyer-intent prompts disproportionately ask comparison questions: "X vs Y", "best X under $Y", "alternatives to X". Almost nobody writes good comparison content from their own brand's perspective; most of what exists comes from affiliate sites optimizing for click revenue. If you publish honest, fact-dense comparison content — and your structured data lets the LLMs trust it — you become a primary citation for those queries.

4. Build a canonical, AI-citable brand profile

Pick one URL on the open web that is the canonical source for "what is this brand, and what does it sell?" — and make sure it's structured, complete, and current. For most brands, the choice is between maintaining a thorough Wikipedia entry, a detailed company profile on a directory (like Crunchbase or Goodfirms), or a verified Brand Hub on a site that LLMs already trust (which is exactly what Citorial Brand Hubs are designed to be).

The point is to give the model exactly one URL it can confidently quote when asked about you. Without one, it makes up the answer from fragments — which is when factual errors and omissions creep in.

5. Measure your starting position before you optimize

GEO without measurement is guesswork. Before you do anything else, run a baseline audit across all four LLMs on 100–300 buyer-intent prompts in your category. You need to know your starting share-of-voice per LLM, which prompts you already win, and which competitors you're losing to.

This is what Citorial audits do — and why every audit includes both a current-state snapshot and a 30–90 day action plan to move the needle. See how it works.

Where to go next

GEO is still a young discipline — most of what works is being discovered empirically, by operators willing to test, measure, and iterate. If you treat it as a separate channel from SEO (with its own metrics, its own content cadence, and its own optimization loop), you will be 12–18 months ahead of the brands that are still waiting for "the dust to settle".

For a tactical deep-dive on the retrieval mechanics, read How AI search engines pick which brands to recommend. For a per-product breakdown of which AI engines are sending real traffic right now, see ChatGPT vs Perplexity vs Gemini for e-commerce traffic.