The diagnostic checklist
Run this sequence against your project before investing in remediation. Most teams find their answer in step 1 or 2.
- Check your tracked prompts. Are they actually the prompts your buyers would ask? Open the Prompts tab. If they are overly generic or off-topic, the engines are answering the wrong question and your brand is (correctly) not surfacing. Regenerate or edit them.
- Check Site Readiness. Is it above 50? If not, the issue is structural — AI engines may not parse your page as an answer candidate. Click "What we check" on the Overview to see which signals are weak.
- Check the Competitors tab. Are competitors cited for your tracked prompts? If yes, the engines are engaged with the category — the problem is you are not winning the comparison. If no, the category is under-indexed for AI entirely and you need a broader prompt set.
- Check Domain Citations. Are the top publishers AI cites in your category ones you have coverage on? If zero overlap, your third-party authority footprint is the bottleneck.
Cause 1: Not enough third-party coverage
AI engines are conservative about citing brand-owned content as the answer. They want independent validation. If your only web presence is your own site, even a beautifully structured site may not earn citations.
Use the Domain Citations tab to find the publishers AI engines already cite in your category. Pitch them directly — a guest post, a vendor roundup inclusion, a review, an industry report citation. One earned placement on a cited publisher is worth ten on your own site.
Cause 2: Weak site readiness signals
If your readiness score is below 50, AI engines may struggle to parse your page. Common weaknesses:
- Walls of text without question-style H2/H3 headings.
- No FAQ schema or structured data markers.
- Missing author bylines, publication dates, or "last updated" indicators.
- Slow load time (AI engines and their crawlers time out too).
- Thin content — under 400 words on pages that should be reference pages.
Run Project again after fixes to see readiness improve. Focus on the weakest signals first — the breakdown panel shows each signal's current point contribution. A page going from 45 → 70 readiness usually produces visible citation rate improvement within two weeks.
Cause 3: Your brand is too new
AI engines rely heavily on training data and retrieval. Both lag the real web by months. If your brand is under 6–12 months old and has minimal web presence, the engines may simply not know you exist yet — no amount of on-page optimization will fix that.
This is a patience + distribution problem, not an optimization problem. Focus on building reputable third-party coverage (directories, review sites, industry publications) and accept that AI citations will lag traditional SEO by 2-4 months. Meanwhile, track weekly — a steady climb is normal.
Cause 4: Entrenched competitors
In some categories (e.g. "best CRM"), the top 3-5 brands have dominated citations for years and AI engines have strong priors about who belongs in the answer. Breaking in requires either a differentiated prompt surface (categories or sub-segments the incumbents do not cover) or a very strong earned-media push.
Open the Competitors tab and look at the engines citing them. What source types? Which publishers? That is your playbook. Also expand your tracked prompts toward narrower buyer questions where incumbents are less entrenched — niche wins compound into broader ones.
When to escalate
If you have worked all four causes for 90 days and see no movement, it is worth investigating whether the AI engines are actively excluding your domain (rare but does happen for sites that violate guidelines) or whether your category is in a transition that is deprioritizing citations broadly. Contact support — we can inspect your scan history and publisher data and give you a read.