About Cited
Cited is built by Sandstorm Digital, a digital marketing agency working in search since 2013. We built it because our own clients needed to know whether AI was naming them - and every tool we looked at measured the wrong thing.
We have been running search for clients across the Gulf and MENA since 2013. In 2024 we started noticing something strange: traffic from AI tools was arriving with no referrer, landing on pages that had never ranked highly for anything, from buyers who converted faster than organic visitors.
We asked the obvious question - which of our clients was actually being named when buyers asked ChatGPT or Perplexity about their category? We looked for a tool to answer it. Nothing we found measured named rate properly. Rank trackers measured page rankings. Listening tools counted mentions in text they scraped. Neither told us what we actually needed: does AI recommend this client when someone asks who to call?
So we built Cited to answer exactly that question, and nothing more.
Search has always been a bet on what buyers type. The question was whether your page matched. AI changes that bet. The question is now whether the model names you when the buyer asks for a recommendation - and the model draws from everything it has seen, not just what you publish.
Measuring this with existing tools meant running prompts by hand, reading through answers, keeping a spreadsheet. It was manual, inconsistent, and impossible to run across a full question set at any useful frequency.
Cited automates that entirely. It writes the questions, asks every engine, reads every answer, and tells you not just where you stand but what you should change and in what order.
Every measurement method in Cited was tested on real client accounts before it became a product feature. If a detection rule did not hold up under live data, it did not ship. If an action recommendation did not move the number it claimed to target, we took it out.
That is not a marketing claim. It is the only way to know whether the tool actually works, and it means Sandstorm Digital uses Cited the same way any customer does - with real stakes behind the numbers.
Brands and agencies that take search seriously, who already know their way around Google Search Console and want the same rigour applied to AI answers. It is not a tool for dipping a toe in. It is for people who want to know the real number, understand where it comes from, and fix what is driving it.
The agency plan supports multiple sites so you can run it across a portfolio. Every project is fully independent: its own question set, its own competitors, its own buyer types, its own measurement cycle.
What it measures
Cited asks your buyers' real questions across every major AI surface and turns what it finds into a ranked list of things to fix.
How often each engine names your brand when someone asks a buying question in your category.
How you compare to named competitors across the same question set and the same engines.
Which domains the engine cited to build the answer - your site, your rivals, or third parties.
The Google searches an engine runs before writing its answer. If you do not rank for these, you were never a candidate.
The same question asked as each of your real buyer types, so you see where you are strong and where you are invisible.
Every gap becomes a specific, assignable action with evidence attached. Not a score. A to-do list.
No account needed to run your first check.